Seesmic was a suite of

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the ...

web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

mobile Mobile may refer to: Places * Mobile, Alabama, a U.S. port city * Mobile County, Alabama * Mobile, Arizona, a small town near Phoenix, U.S. * Mobile, Newfoundland and Labrador Arts, entertainment, and media Music Groups and labels * Mobile ( ...

, and

desktop A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

which allowed users to simultaneously manage

user account A user is a person who utilizes a computer or network service. A user often has a user account and is identified to the system by a username (or user name). Other terms for username include login name, screenname (or screen name), accoun ...

s for multiple

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods fo ...

s, such as

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...

and

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

. Launched in 2008 by French entrepreneur

Loïc Le Meur Loïc Le Meur (born 14 July 1972) is a French entrepreneur and blogger. He served as Executive Vice President EMEA at software company Six Apart after merging French blogging company Ublog with Six Apart in July 2004. In late 2006 Le Meur became ...

, the service was initially a video sharing website, billed as a cross between YouTube and Twitter, allowing short video comments to be published online. Le Meur shut down the service in 2009 due to its stagnating user base, and then relaunched Seesmic as a social networking tool, with a suite of desktop, mobile and web apps integrating streams from Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. Following the failure to monetize the company, in 2011 Seesmic was relaunched yet again as a customer relations management app.

History

Starting out life as a

video blogging A video blog or video log, sometimes shortened to vlog (), is a form of blog for which the medium is video. Vlog entries often combine embedded video (or a video link) with supporting text, images, and other metadata. Entries can be recorded ...

website, its original aim was to make video uploading from webcams easier to promote online video conversations. Seesmic made its debut at the Demo tech conference where it was called the "Twitter of video". It had 20,000 users and 70,000 viewers per month as of 2008. On 3 April 2008, Seesmic announced that it had purchased Twhirl, an

Adobe AIR Adobe AIR (also known as Adobe Integrated Runtime and is codenamed Apollo) is a cross-platform runtime system currently developed by Harman International, in collaboration with Adobe Inc., for building desktop applications and mobile applic ...

based

client. In 2009, Loïc Le Meur, Seesmic's founder, announced that the video portion of the site had stagnated as it struggled to attract new users. He refocused the site, changing the objective from creating a new video social networking site to creating a suite of tools that would instead aggregate content from other social networking sites such as Twitter and

. The video site, whilst remaining available, was relegated to a different

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...

. Le Meur moved from

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Si ...

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

to relaunch Seesmic due to the perception that it would stand a better chance of success there. It was backed by a number of investors, the primary one being Atomico, a venture group that includes Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold

Skype Skype () is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, debi ...

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

in 2005 for $2.6 billion. In January, 2010 Seesmic acquired

Ping.fm Ping.fm was an advertising-supported social networking and micro-blogging web service that enabled users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. Making an update on Ping.fm pushed the update to a number of different social websites at ...

.Pinging In The New Year: Seesmic Acquires Ping.fm
TechCrunch (2010-01-04). Retrieved on 2013-09-21. In March, 2010, Seesmic reached 1 million registered users. Seesmic produced a number of social network clients including: * Seesmic Desktop - a cross platform Twitter and

desktop client written using

. Version 2 was rewritten in

Microsoft Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. ...

and added support for

Google Buzz Google Buzz was a social networking, microblogging and messaging tool that was developed by Google which replaced Google Wave and integrated into their web-based email program, Gmail. Users could share links, photos, videos, status messages an ...

. * Seesmic Web - a Twitter

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serv ...

client for Twitter written using

Google Web Toolkit Google Web Toolkit (GWT ), or GWT Web Toolkit, is an open-source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain JavaScript front-end applications in Java. It is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. GWT emphasizes reusab ...

* Seesmic for Android - a native Twitter client, Facebook, and Salesforce Chatter client for Android * Seesmic for

Windows Phone 7 Windows Phone 7 is the first release of the Windows Phone mobile client operating system, released worldwide on October 21, 2010, and in the United States on November 8, 2010. It runs on the Windows CE 6.0 kernel. It received multiple large upda ...

- a native Twitter, Facebook, and Salesforce Chatter client for Windows Phone 7 * Seesmic for iPhone - a native Twitter, Facebook and Ping.fm client for iPhone and

iPod Touch The iPod Touch (stylized as iPod touch) is a discontinued line of iOS-based mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. with a touchscreen-controlled user interface. As with other iPod models, the iPod Touch can be used as a musi ...

* Seesmic for

BlackBerry The blackberry is an edible fruit produced by many species in the genus ''Rubus'' in the family Rosaceae, hybrids among these species within the subgenus ''Rubus'', and hybrids between the subgenera ''Rubus'' and ''Idaeobatus''. The taxonomy ...

- a native Twitter client for BlackBerry - discontinued in June 2011 In August 2011, Seesmic announced it was moving into the Customer Relations Management business, releasing Android and

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

CRM apps that interfaced with

Salesforce.com Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...

. The former social media apps were being maintained as a "second branch" of the company. In September 2012, Seesmic was acquired by

HootSuite Hootsuite is a social media management platform, created by Ryan Holmes in 2008. The system's user interface takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube an ...

.Seesmic has been acquired by HootSuite
- Seesmic Blog, 6 September 2012

References

{{Aggregators Blog software Software companies established in 2008 Twitter services and applications Discontinued software 2008 establishments in France Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Software companies disestablished in 2012 2012 disestablishments in California Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area 2012 mergers and acquisitions Defunct social networking services