If your job description mentions Facebook and Twitter by name, you need a social media aggregator, an application that centralizes the incoming and outgoing information for multiple social networking profiles. Seesmic Desktop 2 (free) is a dossier for every account you could possibly have, from Ning to Ping.fm, and possibly some you've never even heard of, such as 6dgree and Zendesk (both are for customer service). The extensive plug-in library that lets you connect virtually any social networking platform or tool to Seesmic makes the app unbeatable for power users—except that the desktop version does not include the ability to schedule posts that you don't want to publish immediately (although you can do this in Seesmic's Web app).

Casual users will find Seesmic's features, options, and customizations too generous. The time and effort needed to set up all these add-ons and learn how to use the tool can be crushing. Even some online social butterflies will feel their productivity crippled for a day or two by Seesmic's learning curve. Most people are in better hands with HootSuite (free to $5.99 per month for Pro, 4 stars) or TweetDeck (free, 4 stars), which are just as powerful, easier to set up, and less intimidating than Seesmic. Both HootSuite and TweetDeck support scheduled posts, too.

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The only reason a seasoned social media user might choose Seesmic over HootSuite or TweetDeck is for the networks and tools included in the list of plug-ins. If you only use the big three—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn—Seesmic doesn't offer you anything over what HootSuite and TweetDeck deliver, and they're easier to learn. And if you do like Seesmic, you might as well use the Web app rather than the desktop version, as it supports scheduled posting.

Getting Into Seesmic
The Seesmic desktop client runs on Microsoft Silverlight, which makes it compatible with both Mac and Windows machines. At 4.4MB, it's a fairly lightweight application that installs quickly. Load it, launch it, and prepare to spend the next hour at least configuring and customizing it.

Connecting social media accounts is easy and takes about as much time as entering your username and password for each site, then granting Seesmic access to it. Exploring the interface and options, however, requires a lot more time.

Seesmic has four main tabs that run vertically along the left side: All, Accounts, Userlists, and Searches. ("All" shows all the accounts that you've connected in addition to everything listed in the other three tabs.) Each of those tabs has an additional menu, and within each menu, there are even more options. Some of those options have yet more selections. These are all in addition to the many sub-pages of the Options area, the back-end section where you can customize the app.

The first time I flicked through all the menus and tabs, Seesmic overwhelmed me, and it didn't get much better on the second, third, or even fourth time around. It's not that the information is disorganized, it's that there's a lot to take in regardless. Some of what appears in the hierarchical system is in fact redundant, although that's to be expected. The more complex an online system, the more key concepts should be intentionally repeated to drive home their importance to the user and make them easier to find. But intentional redundancy is also a sign that a product or interface has too much stuff in it, and Seesmic could stand some trimming.

Once you're up and running, Seesmic centralizes all the incoming and outgoing messages from the social media sites you've connected to it. Like TweetDeck, it displays different streams according to your customization, in vertical bars. For example, you can have a stream for all incoming Twitter messages from everyone you follow, a second Twitter stream that shows only messages people have sent at (@) you, a third stream that only pulls status updates from Facebook, and so on. You can drag any one of these vertical columns to a new location at any time, although the visual effect that confirms the object is being moved lagged for me every single time.

Seesmic offers additional columns you can add to the app that go beyond your connections, such as Twitter Trending; Twitter Directory, which shows a list of topics and accounts on those topics to help you find more people to follow; Channels, which reveals select businesses and the Twitter users associated with them; and Marketplace, which helps you find and add more Seesmic plug-ins.