If you’re even a semi frequent twitter user, you’ve probably heard or maybe even use a 3rd party desktop application to manage your twitter account – I mean, going to twitter.com to tweet is so very last month.

I’ve been using tweetdeck so far because it allows you to create groups and searches as columns and then effectively respond to twitter from a dashboard on your laptop. I can’t really imagine using twitter any other way now. tweetdeck, however causes some folks some heartburn because it seems to be a bit of a resource hog.

This week I started to play with another desktop entry called Seesmic Desktop and I have to tell you there are some features I think I’m going to like.

Click to enlarge image

Here are some of the features that I think make it stand out.

Left hand sidebar makes navigation great

With an entire suite of information nested in the sidebar of navigation you can jump around from account to account, search to search and userlist to userlist without opening up a giant screen and scroll routine. Any search or group you click on comes front and center.

Multiple accounts in one window

Let’s face it, there are lots of reason to have and manage more than one twitter account – business or personal, customer service and sales, etc. With Seesmic you just click from account to account and view and respond.

Userlists in a list

Seesmic calls groups userlists and userlists are a great way to manage. You can put family members in one list, workers in another, must reads in another and then, again with the sidebar pick a list to read.

Search on the fly adds a search list

Create any search and it’s saved as a search list, you can click on the list in the sidebar and it jumps first in line. I know this sounds simple but it’s a big time and desktop space saver.

Sent category

I guess this goes back to my email days, but I can’t tell you how many times I find a contact or trail of messages by looking in my sent box. Seesmic has the ability to show you tweets you sent as replies or DMs.

In the course of discussing this app with some folks on twitter I was also told to check out
Destroytwitter (unfortunate name if you ask me)
Nambu

The race is certainly on to evolve the perfect social media desktop tool so many of these will come and go and eventually act as tools to engage all forms of social media.

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