Are Seesmic about to drop the ball?

Image by philcampbell via Flickr

Like many of the things I blog about here to whinge about – I’m actually a big fan of Seesmic.

Firstly I used Twhirl religiously for my desktop Twitter app and it took the launch of Seesmic Desktop to lure me a way.

I lean heavily on Seesmic Desktop. I maintain 6 Twitter accounts; mine, some from bigmouthmedia and some others (one for a game, etc). By a mile Seesmic Desktop is the best client for multiple accounts.

They offer a single column that lets me view all the Tweets any of my accounts have access to. I can filter that column to see either the DMs to any of those accounts or any of the replies to those accounts. Amazingly Tweetdeck can’t do this. I have to have individual columns for individual accounts.

It all went wrong with the upgrade to Seesmic Desktop 0.4. Within minutes my laptop was sluggish. The Seesmic client simply took an age to respond.

A glance at the Task Manager showed Seesmic Desktop up at over 50% CPU usage.

I moaned about this to @seesmic and was invited to email Yama. That’s great. It shows they’ve been listening but I’ve not had a response. I’m not sure they’ve acknowledged there’s an issue.

I was sitting and waiting. I’ve been forced to use Tweetdeck which I’m slowly getting to grips with. Tweetdeck means lots of horizontal scrolling and a greater risk of Tweeting from the wrong account that any of the clients I’m familiar with.

What’s triggered this post is the insight that Seesmic have been alerted to a possible security issue with Twhirl and that they’re choosing to ignore the fix. Twitpwn has the details.

I think the last paragraph says it all;

Instead of applying a one character fix to this vulnerability (by simply adding an "s" to the HTTP request), Seesmic have decided to ignore my continuous requests to fix this vulnerability.

I like Seesmic. They’re funded. They’ve money for staff but I suspect they’re in the growing pains stage and are struggling to keep up with demand, promises to investors and current users. I don’t pay them a penny but I’m still up in arms because they’ve “upgraded” software so that I can’t use it. This is a problem their business model but they’re not alone.