Seesmic

» see seesmic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard the seesmic name was in a 2011 techcrunch retrospective about twitter clients, by which point seesmic itself had already pivoted away from being a twitter client. the san francisco web 2.0 conference circuit was the place where seesmic lived loudly across 2008 and 2009, le meur was a fixture at le web in paris and the early south by southwest crowd in austin. honestly that circle did not reach ankara, the only twitter client i was using around 2010 was tweetdeck on the desktop and the official mobile app on the early iphone.

seesmic launched in 2008 as a video-comment service. anyway, the framing in the early press was that it was a cross between youtube and twitter, you posted a short webcam video and the timeline showed video replies threaded back to the original post. the founders were loïc le meur and johann romefort, both ex-six apart through their earlier french blog company. the bet was that conversation would move to video as upload speeds caught up.

the video bet did not work. by 2009 the seesmic video service was wound down and the company relaunched as a desktop twitter dashboard called seesmic desktop. the new product competed directly with tweetdeck for the power-user twitter audience. seesmic shipped clients across windows mac an air-based version a web version ios android blackberry and windows phone. for whatever reason the lineup was wider than tweetdeck's, the product itself was lighter and slower to add new twitter features.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the twitter-client years were the most-used version of seesmic. through 2010 and into 2011 seesmic had a couple million install counts across all platforms, the air desktop version was the most-used build, the web version was the second. anyway, the user base was the power-twitter crowd that wanted column-based multi-account views and saved searches. tweetdeck had the same audience and was further along on the feature pace, seesmic competed mostly on platform coverage and a lighter ui.

the inflection came in may 2011 when twitter bought tweetdeck. the twitter platform team had already started signaling that third-party clients were on a short leash, the developer terms in june 2011 made it explicit that twitter wanted users on its own apps for the timeline experience. for whatever reason the seesmic team read the writing earlier than some of the other client makers and started pivoting toward enterprise integrations, the desktop client kept shipping but the company narrative shifted to crm and salesforce.

~ the pivots ~

seesmic ping was the bridge product. anyway, it was a multi-network status updater that posted to twitter facebook and linkedin from one box, aimed at the small-business social-media person who managed company accounts. by 2011 the company had a salesforce-integrated version called seesmic for salesforce, the pitch was that customer support tickets in salesforce could surface twitter mentions and replies in the same workspace. the product worked, the market for it was narrow, salesforce already had a sprawling app exchange of competitors at the same price band.

but the techcrunch coverage from 2012 mostly framed seesmic as a wind-down candidate by that summer. for whatever reason the consumer twitter-client business had been bleeding active users to the official twitter apps, the crm business was not growing fast enough, the company had taken a series of funding rounds that needed an exit. hootsuite acquired seesmic on september 5 2012 (close enough). the price was not disclosed publicly, the announcement framed it as a customer-acquisition deal more than a technology purchase, hootsuite folded the seesmic crm features into its own enterprise plan and quietly shut the consumer clients over the following months.

~ the next chapter ~

seesmic's longest-lasting trace is the twitter-third-party-client pattern it sat inside. tweetdeck got bought by twitter and lived another decade inside the official platform. seesmic got bought by hootsuite and disappeared. echofon and twitterrific both ran for a few more years before twitter's api restrictions in 2018 and again in 2023 killed most of what remained. for whatever reason the third-party client era is what made twitter usable for power users in the early years and what twitter spent the next decade clawing back.

in '26 the seesmic name is mostly a footnote in twitter-platform histories, alongside tweetie before it became the official twitter ios app. le meur went on to leade.io and other ventures in san francisco. honestly the broader pattern was that the san francisco web 2.0 conference circuit produced a wave of companies that launched fast on real-time-conversation premises in 2007 and 2008, and most of them were gone or absorbed by 2012 once twitter and facebook closed off the platform layer (close enough).

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