Seesmic Look: A Twitter Client for Your Mom

Kristopher Smith — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:23:54 +0000

By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

I need to start this off by saying that I really, really wanted to like Seesmic Look. From the language that was being thrown around about it online my expectations were to see something other than what was presented today at The Times Center.

I’ll start at the beginning. The user interface is beautiful. At the core of the design is a Zune marketplace aesthetic that that utilizes transparency, negative space and various sized fonts and images in a vertical flow for importance.

However, this architecture and contextually disappearing, reappearing menu and login system is not for your mom, grandma or pseudo-tech savvy snookums.

Twitter Surfing

I’m not sure that Look is what normally would be called a Twitter client – as it requires no login to Twitter for usage and allows Look users to surf tweets without the ability to participate. In the biz that is called lurking.

All of the tweet streams are prescribed (curated) and presented with top 10’s and platform partner’s Twitter streams in mind. Discovery for those not participating and only lurking is limited to a one way transmission.

Once logged in to Look is does become a full-fledged Twitter client but lacks the common language used in the Twitter community to describe features and functions.

The Branded Twitter Experience

Within Look the branded streams are called channels and are even less sexy. Kodak, RedBull, HuffPo – no one that this application is aimed at cares that your CEO, CMO or CIO are on Twitter. They want your social media people that can answer support questions for them, product deals and regular employees.

For the Living Room

One of the product goals for Looks is fairly evident, and that is a place in the living room on web connected televisions. Lemeur demoed Look on an HP box with a remote control to navigate between menus and scroll tweets. It went off without a hitch.

No innovation

Renaming what have become standard functions and treating Twitter like email is not innovation. The user interface is fresh and the information architecture is intuitive (when the menus don’t disappear) but it isn’t earth shattering. Watching Tweets for search or as a stream is no different than the conference projections seeking hash tags for the event.

Expectations

I did not expect to see a Twitter surfing application today. What I expected to see was an application that was integrated with Ping.fm to provide a Twitter-like experience that could operate online and offline.

I had envisioned something that would work with Twitter when it needed to but it would also connect to other social networks like the most popular one for Moms, Dads and Grams – Facebook.That would have been innovation.

Instead it is another client that runs on the Twitter backbone and will suffer the same fate as all other Twitter clients when the network or API has issues.

Windows only?

This is the new web. This is the new social web. This is the new social platform agnostic world. Enough said.

Of note

With all of the agencies and brands involved I even sort of expected Look to have built in metrics. Maybe Seesmic is saving those numbers for their partners with activity and click-stream measurement, but none of that was mentioned today.

We’ve posted quite a bit about Seesmic and the work that they have done. They are a solid company with over 1 million users with Ping.fm included that will continue to create new products and help people to communicate online.