Loïc Le Meur blog

0 Video: day two, how we are getting LeWeb ready

Day 2: a new backstage video of how we get ready the LeWeb venue for the 2200 participants from 46 countries

0 Video: preparing the LeWeb 2009 venue

Here is a quick video of the huge LeWeb room getting setup and ready for the 2,200 participants from 46 countries this year.

0 France Info interview about LeWeb09

Leading French radio France info interviewed me about this years edition and also captured it in video (in French). Thank you David Abiker and Jerome Colombain for having us on your show. We are thrilled to have France Info as media partner this year.

Parlons Net Le Meur le Web 09 Twitter Facebook Lefebvre
par FranceInfo

0 LeWeb iphone app with live video streaming launched

Get your iphones now and search LeWeb to get our iphone app that our friends at Mobile Roadie created for us in partnership with our streaming partner Ustream.

We think it's just awesome but tweet us what you think, here are the main features:
-get a live feed of the LeWeb stage as it happens on your iphone (a premiere!) with ustream
-latest news and tweets from/about LeWeb
-all the agenda with details from all the sessions and you can checkin to say you are going
-integrated chat and you can tweet/facebook your comments directly from the app
-find details about ANY participant and their twitter names to contact them (that is going to come handy for networking)
-maps of the venue and where everything is (it is a huge venue and lots of spaces to discover this year, like amazing coffee from Nespresso for example)
-photos and links, archived video sessions

Mobile Roadie has create a very impressive app for us and we would like to thank the entire team, especially Michael Schneider and Sean Percival who will both be on stage at LeWeb to show off the app and more.

Here is what Leena Rao at TechCrunch wrote about it and a video that demoes the app, see you in Paris and if you are not in Paris you will feel like you are with us from the comfort of your iphone!

0 Roasting Scoble

and David Hornik also roasted Scoble nicely (I love the thumbnail with the play on your nose Dave!)

0 More On Seesmic's Vision of Programmable Twitter clients

I announced during Ray Ozzie's keynote at the Microsoft PDC that Seesmic is building a programmable Twitter client so I am glad that Dave Winer likes this idea too and might be interested in building the first features. In fact it is the main reason why we decided to entirely re-write Seesmic Desktop in native Windows code, building a plugin architecture in a Twitter client was just impossible, right now, with Adobe Air.

Seesmic for Windows is ready to become a programmable client and Windows allows us to do it in a secure way. We are hoping that it becomes a development platform such as Firefox and its very successful plugins.  

Dave gives an interesting example of a feature he would like that would probably not get built in a client like Seesmic otherwise:

"for example, it’s been about two years since I first asked for an “unfollow-with-timeout.”

Use-case: Someone is live-tweeting a conference I don’t care about and hogging up all my bandwidth. I want to unfollow them for just a day. Now I don’t think the client guys are going to implement this anytime soon, but it’s the kind of feature a few hundred people would kill for."

We have received hundreds of mails from developers who would like to build features or their services integrated in Seesmic clients and we are building the platform to let them do that. In fact we have already started asking our users what services they would like to see integrated on Seesmic and vote for the most popular ones.

Integrating outside services should become the most popular way to program Seesmic clients and it is definitely the way the industry is going since we see new vertical applications such as stock twits (which even launched its own client) or very targeted directories such as vc maven for venture capitalists on Twitter, giantredcarpet for celebrities and many more. Stock Twits should not have to build its own client, our vision is to make Seesmic flexible enough that other services can just use it as a platform.

Another example are the social software themselves. From non US social software to corporate twitter solutions such as the new salesforce chatter or Yammer. In the last months, Yahoo, MySpace, LinkedIn and Six Apart with Typepad Micro have all launched their status update service, we believe all social software services in the world will have one and we simply cannot support them all ourselves, so the Seesmic Platform will also allow them to build their own service into Seesmic.

This is precisely what we are working on and many developers are already getting ready to write the first plugins.

We are aiming at making our clients a platform not only on Windows but also on the web and have already started experimenting with two partners deeply integrated already in Seesmic web, Tweetmeme and MrTweet. Tweetmeme will provide the number of retweets, page and picture previews in the next release of Seesmic Web while MrTweet already adds more info to Twitter profiles in Seesmic web, such as how frequently someone tweets for example.

We are experimenting with a few developers right now but are aiming at making Seesmic Web's user base growth available to all developers very soon

We are not ready to announce the details on the language and how to build for Seesmic for Windows and Seesmic Web yet as we are actively working on it, but we will as soon as we are ready.

In the meantime, please let us know what services you would like to be integrated and if you are a developer what plugins you would be interested in building (use comments below and also make sure you join teamseesmic to get the latest news) so that we get our platform ready to support as many as possible. Thanks in advance for your feedback and your patience while we build seesmic platform, but we're on the case.

update: please leave also your feedback for Seesmic for Windows and Seesmic web on the dedicated pages that could also give us and developers ideas. Thanks.

0 Twitter.com traffic down? Seesmic Web is +30%/month

There are many reports that the traffic from Twitter.com would be going down. We see the opposite on the app side, at least for Seesmic. Seesmic Web is growing very strong as you can see the number of Tweets posted growing.

number of tweets posted on Seesmic Web

Excuse the fact that I removed the scale and the numbers for obvious reasons, just wanted to show you the trend, oh and yes, our internal stats had a problem for a few days explaining the drop you can see, again, just look at the trend and trust me I am not showing off and it’s accurate.

On the overall traffic going to seesmic web (not our site, only our web app) we’re seeing growth around 30% per month and it increased even more as we introduced Twitter lists.

Why? Because Seesmic Web is the only site where you can have self-refreshing lists in a multi-column view today and Twitter users who like lists enjoy that. It is impossible  very difficult to do on any desktop application for the time being as it would burn immediately your Twitter limits as you increase the number of lists displayed and refreshing.

We were first to add lists on Seesmic Desktop and now also on Seesmic for Windows but we won’t make them self refreshing until we find a solution with Twitter, and we’re working on it, confident there will be one. In the meantime, our users are enjoying these features on Seesmic Web.

 Ask Scoble and go try Seesmic Web, hope you will like it too.

Twitter is not going down. It is growing like hell, but as a platform, as a motherboard for all the Twitter ecosystem and I am betting that it will continue this way. It is very smart from the Twitter team to let the apps grow so fast and give them access to features that are not even on Twitter.com

Take location, we already display location on Seesmic Web, Twitter.com does not display it yet and we’re very proud of that.

Oh and in case you have not noticed, we’re the Twitter app on the highest number of screens, we have Seesmic Web, Seesmic for Windows, Seesmic Desktop, Seesmic for Android and Seesmic for Blackberry. More soon.

Thank you to our friends at Twitter for giving us so powerful tools for our users, you guys rock.

0 Twitter Location Enabled in Seesmic Web

As Twitter just rolled out location we're happy to announce that Seesmic Web already displays location in Tweets which have updated the Twitter location API. When you see a little pin next to a user just rollover it to see a map as shown below.

0 Seesmic for Windows preview launching today!

From left to right: Julien Codorniou, Jaime Rodriguez, Marco Kaiser, Johann Romefort, Nicolas Kardas, Daryll McDade and myself.

This morning at the Microsoft PDC conference I announced Seesmic for Windows during the Ray Ozzie opening keynote. 5,000 developers in the room and many more on the live stream!

Seesmic for Windows will be available as a preview to TeamSeesmic members today. You you can join here. It is a preview which means it is not bug free and there are some missing features. We are sending this first version to gather feedback from our users, as we always do.

Better user experience

We want to provide the very best user experience to our users and building a real Windows application was obviously something we had to do since the vast majority of our users are on Windows. When we reach a final version Seesmic for Windows should provide a very smooth, fluid and light experience. It also will benefit from the Windows environment to deliver fast kick ass features such as Windows7 being able to send your location if you want to or several languages in spell checker which is something we were not able to do on our previous platform. Many more we are working on too.

Developer platform

We have had many requests from developers who want to integrate their services in Seesmic Desktop and our team is too small to integrate them all. We have always wanted to provide a secure plugin architecture so that developers can create for Seesmic themselves and it will become very soon a reality thanks to the Windows environment. We are looking forward to seeing our current partners already integrated in Seesmic web (Tweetmeme and MrTweet) as well as many others we hope create plugins for Seesmic and benefit from our growing user base.

Great support and teamwork from Microsoft

Microsoft has provided great support to help us get started on the Microsoft platform. I would just like to thank the team who has been working with us to make it possible for us to deliver a product in such a short period of time, not talking about the incredible opportunity to present as the opening demo of Ray Ozzie's keynote: Julien Codorniou, Jaime Rodriguez, Nicolas Kardas and Daryll McDade. I would also like to thank the BizSpark team who provided us with all the development tools for free, which is golden for startups. Many others have helped. Thank you all.

This is only a beginning, as I explained during the demo we deliver today a Windows version but are experimenting with Silverlight to make Seesmic available on 3 screens and a cloud: PC, mobile, the big screen and everything synched in the cloud. 

Stay tuned for more and thank you again. The Microsoft platform rocks. TeamSeesmic, thanks for all your feedback we will need it to make Seesmic for Windows the best Twitter experience ever!

0 Seesmic future team interview by Robert Scoble

Thanks for the cool interview, Robert, about the future of Seesmic