What I like about the Seesmic’s acquisition of Twhirl isn’t that I’m using it as my default client for Twitter. Or that I happen to use Seesmic and look forward to some chocolate and peanut butter goodness.
I thought last year was the year of offline apps. And it was, of platforms. The rise of AIM was a case in point, but it still needed a kller app. It might still, and when Eugene Lee first mentioned Twhirl to me I didn’t take too much note of it beyond richer clone of Twitterific. Later adopted it and you learn about social tools by playing with them.
The thing is we will see more special purpose browser clients that leverage the opaque flows of APIs. We’ve all expected it, but now we see them enriching the desktop. Look at PicLens. Just look and look and look how it augments, for now, the browser experience. Expect that Tim Berners Lee expected an editor, not a browser. And then with varying media and microcontent, the possibilities are even more diverse than what you expect now.
In the enterprise, of course, this has to get past the standard desktop model that is administered. Individual choice will still thrive within he standard browser. But experimentation of a richer, more persistent and connected web will happen. As we reverberate between centralization and decentralization, with darlings like FriendFeed feeding upon a small ebb of fragmentation, the timing is right for things that bring our disparate activity together for us in new ways (not that Lifetreaming is new, its the pattern and time in which solutions are brought to bear for them).
The Seesmic thing makes sense on a number of levels beyond the trend line. It starts with how a flash vdeo client plays well with AIM. And the need to hook into the command line of an emerging web (and for twitter and others it becomes interesting if clients that subsume attention subsume more). Just follow the attention and gestures that mean something (Steve Gilmore, where art thou?).
None of this is ready for mainstream (consumer, already made the other point). But, I, for one, welcome our new atomized client underlords. The underweb, today, fits those who do more than browse in their pajamas. And if you think more than that — too much information.
