The new Seesmic Desktop Twitter client has similar features and look to TweetDeck, but better.

The Twitter client wars have just been taken to a whole new level by Loic Le Meur and his company Seesmic with the release of Seesmic Desktop. Makers of the popular desktop client Twhirl, Le Meur and his team know how to make a killer app and by borrowing *heavily* from rival app TweetDeck, they have created what has the potential to be the mother of all Twitter clients.

Tweetdeck and Twhirl have been the two desktop apps that I have used exclusively for the past few months. From a marketing perspective, Twhirl is important due to its ability to handle multiple accounts, albeit in separate windows. For a personal account and for keeping up to date on common searches, TweetDeck is preferable because of the column layout that lets you put updates, @ replies, DMs and search results in their own columns, side by side. Visually, however, this combination left me wishing I had an extra monitor just to handle the two.

Where Seesmic Desktop (now referred to as SD until they come up with a shorter name) trumps both clients is by combining these features into one window. Like Twhirl, SD is built on Adobe AIR and as such will have access to AIR’s stability and growing feature set. It also has the ability to handle multiple accounts, something that is key to the Internet marketing crowd. Mimicking TweetDeck, your multiple accounts and common searches can be organized into columns, giving easy access to updates and data. Again, key for Internet marketers.

Before that all starts to sound overwhelming, the one feature of SD that I really think sets it apart is the “Home” column, a real-time stream of all tweets received from each account, organized chronologically as they come in. Each tweet is labeled with the account from where it came and is intuitive enough to combine the same tweet if it comes into multiple accounts. See the pic above at the top of the far left column. That tweet was written by me (@chazbeaner) and since Wicked PR (@wickedpr) follows me, it was received by both accounts and SD combined them into one and marked it as such. A little thing that impressed me a lot.

The functionality is very similar to Twhirl as you get the same RT, DM, @ and Profile buttons if you hover over a user’s profile pic, and the fonts and layout are also similar.

However, there are a couple of things that could use some tweaking before I declare it the begin-all-and-end-all of Twitter clients. The fluidity of dragging columns, especially for adding another account as a column, is not great. When the window first opens, you have a very small area on which to place your mouse pointer to get the column to drop in properly, or you just end up replacing your existing column or going off the draggable area. Maybe not a big deal, but could be made better.

The list of URL shorteners is, well, short. Not a big deal for me since I use is.gd for brevity and bit.ly for tracking for the most part anyway and both made the cut. There are several that are glaringly absent, like tinyurl.com and the new kl.am (which somehow miraculously managed to salvage a lot of zi.ma‘s URLs when that service went under), and the dubious inclusion of the new digg.com service (which is not getting great reviews, especially from an SEO standpoint – read about it near the end of this article). One feature I would like to see come over from Twhirl is the ability to add in a bit.ly username and API key so that URLs you shorten on Twhirl will be added to your list of URLs on the bit.ly site and tracked. This would be huge.

SD has no TweetShrink or 12 Seconds (video) support, or any popular/recent hashtag(#) or trending tools, but I’ve never used the first two and usually only glance every once in a while at trends. It does have the ubiquitous TwitPic support, which has become a given in any Twitter client worth its salt nowadays.

Now, where SD will really becomes indispensable is if it adds other services as reported by TechCrunch:

Currently the client only serves Twitter but Le Meur says that eventually Seesmic Desktop will have integrate with Facebook, Digg, Identica, Ping.FM and FriendFeed.

Just Facebook alone would be amazing from a personal standpoint, and even better if it can do multiple account (Fan Page) management. Then I really would need a larger monitor, possibly a 47″ TV hanging on the wall displaying nothing but SD. Heh, how cheap are those TVs right now anyway? I love new gadgets.