Loïc Le Meur blog

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

0 30 predictions for the future of Twitter

At the 140conf conference in LA, Jeff Pulver asked me to think about the future of Twitter and even though I obviously have no crystal ball, I took some risks and here you go, I gathered my predictions here, in the form of "tweet slides" so you might want to watch the video too. Some of those predictions were suggested to me by my friends on Twitter, let me know if I missed one credit as I prepared it... in realtime).

It will reach masses of people

They won’t use 
the same tools as we do

It will not be only about Twitter
 -status updates will be open across social software
 -all social software will have status updates
 -Facebook has 40+ million updates a day

Twitter will still be dominant
 in status updates
it's the motherboard on which we plug in

We will laugh thinking we were updating them all manually

The social graph 
will also open up

Twitter will be big to get an idea of a person or a brand reputation
not by number of followers but mostly influence with retweeting and lists
lets you think like that person thinks

Twitter will replace SMS for millions of people
-it is portable and archives across devices
-you don’t need to remember a phone number
-you are not tied to a mobile operator

Twitter might replace Chat for many people, too
-a DM exchange is very similar to a private chat
-Twitter lists are very similar to a public chat room

Location will be one of the most widespread status update

Private updates will be bigger than public updates
(my kids say...)

Public ecommerce 
status updates won’t work
buying things is very intimate

Live reviews of any place and product will deeply influence it though

Promos by brands and retailers will have big success 
for last minute deals

Talking to shops and restaurants via Twitter will become standard
and will get opt in coupons as we enter a shop, based on location

Web will be a fraction 
of mobile use

Dating over Status updates
won’t be big 

Twitter won’t display 
ads in your main feed

Users will get too angry at unsolicited ads

Other revenue opportunities such as pro accounts for businesses will be enough

There will be more devices publishing updates than humans
wifi scale, planes, trains, cars all posting updates

Corporations will have entire teams devoted to Twitter and status updates

Hyperlocal news sites with Twitter geotagging feature
(thanks, @stevefarnworth)

Google and Bing will be the dominant ways to search Twitter

Google will have its own Twitter and won’t acquire Twitter

There will be a few alternatives for niche search such as brand monitoring

Internal Enterprise Twitter like services will become standard

Vertical Twitter apps 
will start to appear

Stocktweets is the first one

Twitter will remain mostly used outside of Twitter.com

Language will evolve adapting to 140char, concise, ignore rules (thanks, @bernard_d)

@mentions spam will grow and become a tough to solve issue

There will be less and less bullshit 
in public events and in general

It will always be about you, 
not the tools

Oh and that makes 34 predictions, not 30, a few more came in last minute :-) add yours in comments!

0 My Mac OSX essential apps I could not live without

Since I had so many problems with Snow Leopard I finally completely backed up my mac and wiped it. Rather than getting it all back from a backup I just did a clean install of snow leopard (which now finally feels super fast) and I reinstalled the apps one by one, so I thought like sharing with you my must have.

-quicksilver to open super fast any app without using the mouse
-1password to only remember one password and that's all, for all the sites, with the 1password safari plugin
-delicious safari plugin to bookmark fast
-xmarks to sync my bookmarks from the cloud and find them on any computer I am
-seesmic for my social software life (you had no doubt about this one I am sure)
-mailplane to easily manage several gmail accounts
-skype  to stay in touch with my company (we use it continuously to work) and my friends
-spanning sync syncs my gmail contacts and calendar with the mac ical and contacts
-evernote to take notes and find them on all my computers and mobile
-fluid to make a web app behave like a normal app, works great with seesmic web 
-skitch to screencapture fast, add cool comments and post

oh and of course I forgot you need ilife to get imovie so I have to look for that dvd everywhere now.

I guess those I simply cannot live without those. Now my Mac feels real fast so I will enjoy that!

0 New features and languages on Seesmic web

We've added additional languages Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish in addition to English, German, Chinese and Romanian.
New also posting bar, reply to all feature and MrTweet partnership. More very soon!

0 Facebook Pages in Seesmic Desktop 0.6

Facebook Pages
We're excited to share with you a new feature that will allow Seesmic Desktop to access and manage your Facebook Pages. In version 0.6, you now can view and manage any Facebook Page you follow. Configure each Facebook Page to show up as a column, posts messages, and respond to comments and likes as you do in your personal Facebook feed. If you are the administrator, you can post messages as the administrator. With the Facebook Page feature, you have greater control on how you market your business, oversee your brand, listen to your fans and build your community.

View Facebook Pages in separate columns

Configure which Facebook Pages you want to show in the navigation bar (sidebar) in Seesmic Desktop

Manage Administered Pages that you’ve published

To learn more about creating Facebook Pages:
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=905
To create a Facebook Page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

If you don't have a Facebook Page, go and build one now!

Reply to All
Save time communicating with your friends and followers by replying to all of the usernames listed in a message. Instead of writing all the usernames when responding to a message, or "re-tweeting" and the editing a message, simply click on the gearwheel in an avatar and "Reply to All."

Favorites column
Along with an aggregated view of your full timeline (HOME, REPLIES, PRIVATE, and SENT), we have now added a FAVORITES column. Along with seeing a separate favorites view for each account, you now have a full view of all of your messages marked as favorite. We've also added the function to "Unfavor" a message, giving you full control to identify and manage your favorite messages.

Click on FAVORITES to see all the favorite messages in one column

Partnership with YFROG
We want to bring you the best for your shared pictures and we are proud to announce a new partnership with YFROG who becomes today our default picture posting service for all Seesmic applications. Click on the camera icon in either client and post your photos to Twitter via yfrog. It's just that simple. Yfrog is an easy way to share photos and videos from wherever you happen to be. Yfrog's infrastructure is powered by ImageShack, a safe and reliable hosting media since 2003.  

0 Flickr iPhone app video review

Flickr just released its native iPhone app, very clean and polished design, the flickr fans will love it. I have been disappointed that it does not let you share on Flickr and Facebook directly from the app.

0 I miss Paris

I just landed in Paris and the more I come back since I left two years ago the more I seem to miss it. Far from a point where I would consider coming back, but I miss it.

Trying to describe what I miss is not easy since now when I visit it is only for a few days and I feel like a tourist, kind of. Somehow. Like if I am from here and not anymore at the same time.

I miss my friends

That's obvious, I have many friends here that I have to see in a sprint mode when I visit and I can't see them all. This feeling is always balanced by the fact that I have an equal number of friends in Silicon Valley, if not more, now, that I would also miss.

I miss the way business is done believe it or not

In Paris I had always more than a month of lunch and breakfast meetings booked in advance. It would sound crazy to anyone in California but in Paris you meet people for the famous two hour or more lunches, generally one by one. It does not scale, like a grand chef cooking does not scale, but it does not matter, it is quality relationships you often build for life and I miss them. I am not even talking about the food yet here, but our capacity in a busy business day to not check email, shut down phones and just focus on catching up and getting to know each other better.

There are plenty of negatives associated to that habit, like for example the fact that most people are very hard to reach, meet and of course get to know deeply. Of course, they have months of meetings taken in advance during which they are busy catching up with each other. It was not rare that a lunch would be taken two or even three month in advance with someone important, your agenda fills fast this way. Of course you can think about how much time you gain by doing the San Francisco sandwich instead, but you lose the deep relationships that are very useful in this city.

I miss the food

I had to say it and it's loud and clear. My american friends often tell me San Francisco is one of the best places in the US for restaurants and finding good products. Indeed I love the Tartine bakery bread or the Ozumo sushis, even a good fat burger sometimes. But you have to leave Paris to realize how lucky you are when you live here, I have yet to find anywhere in the world as tasty oysters as our fines de claires or bretonnes, our bread and croissants which feel obvious here are unrivaled not to talk about the ambiance in Paris restaurants.

I sometimes even miss how badly the waiters treat you in hip places, it is part of the show. Sometimes I don't want to hear the fake "how are you doing today?" from that server in america who tells it without heart. Get your ass kicked in a branche restaurant in Paris because you can't find a table and have to wait, it will be heartfelt when the Costes hostess is so unpolite! Genuine and authentic.

Don't get me started about the fromager, I used to visit him once a week and spend an hour discussing and choosing cheese. Yes you can find very goodcheese and nice shops in San Francisco, but nothing as genuine and seasonal as here.

I miss the fashion and the style

My wife Geraldine and I often talk about it. Parisian girls dress up. Always. Even when they do not look like, they work their look a lot. Again, in San francisco many do too, but the jeans and baskets rule and frankly, I'd rather see my wife and the parisian girls wearing skirts more often and being sophisticated daily (Geraldine is very sophisticated daily though, anywhere she leaves). Better for your eyes even if it's less practical to wear. I am saying that as I myself got used to jeans and tshirt as standard business dress, but I could get easily back in the jacket white shirt jeans habit, no suit and tie thank you.

Don't get me wrong, I love San Francisco and the US and it is unlikely we come back before years, but I miss a lot of Paris "je ne sais quoi" as we say in the US. I can very well define what that "je ne sais quoi" is.

Anyway, I wrote this in the taxi from Charles de Gaulle to Paris, it is 23h00 and I need to leave you to enjoy oysters and fantastic steak tartare with a good bordeaux wine at one of my favorite place, with Rodrigo Sepulveda also known as @rodrigo that will enjoy them as much as I do.