A Seesmic conversation about norms

[by Jeremy Vaught, Community Blogger - Seesmic]

The video conversation has come a long way since I first joined Seesmic in early November.  I'm not here to document it right now, but rather to point out not only a great conversation, but also the exhibition of that conversation.  I'll start with the exhibit.

Brought to my attention by Thomas Knoll, follow me if you will, to tiil.us/seesmic/norms.  tiil created this site, and what is incredible is that the conversation, this conversation, is extremely easy to follow.  There is not much to be said about the site other than I love it, and you need to check it out.

Now that you are at the site, the only thing that shadows this incredible page, is the incredible content in the discussion about norms on Seesmic.  There is a LOT here, so I'm not going to try to fit it into a box, but instead, I want to invite you to listen to the conversation.  Especially if you are new to Seesmic, and are wondering what Seesmic.com is all about, this is a great place to start.  A very few of the highlights I plucked from the conversation are following.

• "How should I start a thread on Seesmic, what if it has already been discussed" - Howard Rheingold
• "Jump in with both feet" - Paul Swenson
• "The people are active at different times, so bring it up again" - Tapps
• "Cathy's shirt is funny" - Obstructionist
• Many said if you start a conversation, come back to follow up

There is much more there, and of course, if you find this interesting, you can continue to the conversation in Seesmic, or start a new conversation.

Twhirl 8.1 released today

[by Jeremy Vaught, Community Blogger - Seesmic]

Marco is releasing the next version of Twhirl today.  This is version 0.8.1 and is primarily a maintenance release to fix bugs, and add a couple of new features.  If you are curious to learn more about where Twhirl and Seesmic are going, please check out our previous post about Loic on the Gillmore Gang podcast.  And people are talking about Twhirl, I wrote about one such discussion when Tekzilla hosts, Veronica Belmont, and Patrick Norton, were speaking what I'm sure everyone else is thinking. :)

Back too the update.  There will be more details on the Twhirl blog at blog.twhirl.org, but here are a few of the highlights...

• Friendfeed support is more stable
• Added new Twitter API features
• Added Friendfeed 'discussion'
• More options to see a specific users Friendfeed
• Bug fixes

And as always, Twhirl will automatically upgrade when you start it up.  But if you haven't installed it yet, you can get started (or dare I say, give Twhirl and whirl) at Twhirl.org.

Loic on The Gillmore Gang

[by Jeremy Vaught, Community Blogger - Seesmic]

Loic le Meur, the Founder and CEO of Seesmic was recently on the Gillmore Gang, a popular podcast with some of the most well known personalities in New Media.  The show's tag line is "Conversations in technology and social media."

The direct link to the show, including a transcript, can be found here.  I encourage you to listen to the show or read the transcript, but allow me to highlight a few things that apply directly to this blog.

Steve Gillmor: "Do you have any announcements as to what you might be doing with Silverlight in terms of Twhirl?"

Loic le Meur: "Yea, we don’t have an announcement on Twhirl, but we have a partnership with Microsoft where seesmic will be the first mobile client on Silverlight, which should be launched in May. It’s a partnership that started in Mixx in Vegas. Microsoft helped us and created with a company called Tequila-Rapido in France, a mobile client for Seesmic which, entirely on Silverlight, lets you record a video, friend someone, and get a reply entirely on mobile. Given this partnership, we’re busy talking about Twhirl as well, on Silverlight, but I have no announcement to make right now."

Loic le Meur: "We were about to build an AIR client for Seesmic as well, because I believe that people will use video if we make it super simple to use– if it’s on your desktop and you don’t have to go anywhere, then you’re likely to use it more. I started talking to Twhirl; I approached Marco Kaiser, the creator of Twhirl, through Twitter. I asked if he would be interested in integrating with Seesmic, and he said yes, and we started talking and I found two frustrations from him, which I immediately understand. He wanted to work full-time on Twhirl, because it’s his passion and he was doing some other projects which were not that interesting, and so he joined full-time, and now Twhirl is part of Seesmic.

The two reasons, to answer your point– the first one is to make video simpler and we need an integrated experience. You can leave a comment on FriendFeed or star something on FriendFeed through Twhirl. The second reason, now coming to what’s more important for you, is that as a Twitter user, I feel that we should use it better. One of the things which is missing right now is the track function, which you can’t get on anything else than GTalk.

This is an announcement for you on the show, Steve, that we’re adding XMPP to Twhirl, which I think is very important. It’s mostly driven by the fact that we love Twitter, and what we do is very complementary. So we’ll have XMPP on Seesmic and Twhirl. For the people who may not understand what it is exactly—basically, it will allow you, through Twhirl, to get updates live pushed to you without having Twhirl go through the Twitter API and check on the delay you’ve decided. It will allow to you push unlimited updates, because right now on the Twitter API, for those of you who are sometimes surprised that you can’t tweet anymore, there’s a limitation on the API, if you tweet too much, it blocks you."

So there you have it, a few tidbits to get you started.  There are a lot of exciting things happening here at Seesmic, and you will find out about them right here (and a few on the previously mentioned podcast). :)

Stay tuned...

Twhirl love from Tekzilla

[by Jeremy Vaught, Community Blogger - Seesmic]

Mike "Bear" Taylor, a Seesmic developer pointed me to Episode 31 of Tekzilla where co-host Veronica Belmont says her "personal favorite [twitter application] is Twhirl" and that she like it this much.

Co-host Patrick Norton agrees that he is "a fan" of Twhirl.

If you would like to see the nice things they have to say about Twhirl, and even a mention or two of Seesmic, you can see the episode at Tekzilla and the Twhirl segment starts at 14:15.

Thanks Veronica and Patrick!

Thwirl with Friendfeed released

[by Jeremy Vaught, Community Blogger - Seesmic]

Like peanut butter & jelly. Like Lennon & McCartney. Like Jordan & Pippen.  Like rhythm and blues.  Like bacon and eggs.  Like Austin, TX and live music.  Like Twhirl and Friendfeed. 

Wait!  What was that?  Twhirl and Friendfeed!?  Yes!  Just released, go to Twhirl.org and get the new version.  It is the great Twhirl you already know and love, with added goodness.

Marco passed along some screenshots, the first is the new navigation for twitter windows that replaces the combo box for one less click...


This next screenshot is the new accounts manager.  Notice the fashionable Seesmic logo.


And finally, a shot of Friendfeed inside of the Twhirl window...

I asked the creator of Twhirl, Marco Kaiser, about adding Friendfeed to this update, and he said,

"Adding other microblogging or social networking services to twhirl has been requested by many users. While it already supported cross posting status updates to Pownce and Jaiku before, the new integration of Friendfeed accounts adds the ability to receive streams from various sources at once to twhirl. This is really great, and a big step forward."

In fact, according to the Twhirl.org website, some of the things Twhirl already does is...

• runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
• connects to multiple Twitter and Friendfeed accounts
• notifications on new tweets
• shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
• cross-post updates to Pownce and Jaiku
• post images to TwitPic
• search tweets using TweetScan
• timeline filtering
• localized to English, German, Italian and Spanish
• color schemes
• automatically check for new versions

So as you can see, Twhirl is already feature rich, and from talking to Marco, there is more to come, not the least of which is the Seesmic integration. :)

And now, a few bloggers have weighed in on the integration of Friendfeed to Twhirl...

Techrunch.com, LoicLeMeur.com, Lifestreamblog.com, LastPodcast.net, SheGeeks.net, Mashable.com, and many more!  Thanks!
 

TechCrunch adds video comments

[Cathy Brooks - Business Development Maven, Seesmic]

As noted in the previous post, we've finished our Wordpress plug-in for Seesmic, and we're thrilled to announce that today TechCrunch became the first site to integrate this plug-in!

Here's the other cool part - if you want to sign up for Seesmic without an invite code, you can do it through the Wordpress plug-in on this or any site that has it.

Let the games begin!!!

Seesmic Wordpress Plugin Released

[by Jeremy Vaught, Community Blogger - Seesmic]

Whit Scott on Seesmic de Jour today, explained the new Seesmic Wordpress plugin.

For more information, check out wiki.seesmic.com/Wp-plugin.  And as always, let us know what you think!

Seesmic server migration

[by Jeremy Vaught, Community Blogger - Seesmic]

This last week, Seesmic completed a server migration.  I tracked down Johann Romefort, the CTO at Seesmic (no easy task!) to fill me in on some of the details of the migration.

What I found out from Johann was that the migration was a significant and rather complicated one, and it not only made changes to how Seesmic works for the end user, it also made changes to how Seesmic works behind scenes.  The behind-the-scenes updates will assist development in the future, as well as keep Seesmic uptime high.

If you are into the technical bits, this has been accomplished by adding several layers of abstraction, and the new architecture, aimed at achieving vertical and horizontal scaling, also enables the Seesmic developers to work in a very loosely coupled way.

Johann continued to explain to me that for the last several months, the Seesmic developers have been learning the 'hotspots' in the software, and eliminating them.  What these changes, and the migration have done for you, is make Seesmic faster, slightly better video quality, and high availability.  The higher availability is achieved now because several servers can go down now, and Seesmic still runs just fine until they come back again.  This is different from before when Seesmic ran on one server.

Seesmic moved to ServePath servers, and from beginning to end, the migration about one month.  Weekends included.  I tried to get Johann to name some developers that did a great job, but he responded, "Everybody did an outstanding job on that, and I must say I m very proud of my team and of their dedication to Seesmic."  This sentiment was also voiced by everyone else at Seesmic.  This developer team is top notch, so expect to see more great things.

So enjoy the new and improved Seesmic.  There are more updates being announces soon!

Interview with Thomas Knoll

[by Jeremy Vaught, Community Blogger - Seesmic]

Thomas is a shiny new Seesmic employee.  Seesmic is large enough now to need a support structure for everyone using the service, and he is heading that up.  He was in Phoenix today finishing up a previous project, so we agreed to meet.  We had some lunch and stopped off real quick to make this video before dropping him off at the airport.

Great to meet you Thomas, welcome to Seesmic, and I'll see you around the water cooler.

Seesmic and Twhirl, what are your ideas?

[by Jeremy Vaught, Community Blogger - Seesmic]

So I'm cruising my RSS reader and checking on the Seesmic news, but all I can seem to find that is being talked about with Seesmic, is the acquisition of Twhirl.  It is exciting, everyone has their own ideas of what a Seesmic and Twhirl world will look like, so I'm just going to go ahead and ask.

What are your ideas about how Seesmic and Twhirl will be most usefull to you?  The sky is the limit!