When you launch your Internet browser, do you immediately open Twitter and Facebook? Do you log in to LinkedIn several times a week? Are you checking in your friends' whereabouts with Foursquare? If all these browser tabs are cluttering your screen, you need a social media aggregator, a tool that pulls in feeds from all these sites (and others, too) and centralizes them in one place. Aggregators also let you write a post and send it to multiple accounts at once.

Seesmic's Web app (free) gathers all your social media profiles into one window and lets you filter the information that each site delivers, giving you total control over your incoming streams, while helping your manage your outgoing messages, too. Seesmic has several variations of its product, including Seesmic Desktop 2  (free, 3 stars) and a smartphone app (for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7), but the Web app is its leading lady. It offers the one big feature that's missing from the desktop version—post scheduling—although it doesn't support plug-ins, which the desktop does. The desktop version's plug-ins adds real value to power users, who can use them to add nearly any social account you can name, including such niche players as Ning, Ping.fm, 6dgree, and Zendesk.

Functionally, Seesmic's Web app is on par with  HootSuite (free to $5.99 per month for Pro, 4 stars) and  TweetDeck (free, 4 stars). I like TweetDeck best partly because it has a solid desktop client, which I prefer, because it better compartmentalizes social networking activity into its own app (rather than a tab within a browser, where I'm doing other work). HootSuite has more to offer than Seesmic, although at a price, as its paid version is the more robust option. Seesmic's Web app is an okay choice, so long as you're not intending to use its desktop client and mobile apps, too, which aren't as good.

Getting Into Seesmic

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 more time.

Seesmic Web has three main tabs at the top—Home, Messages, and Contacts—as well as a vertical bar at left that shows each of the social media accounts you've connected. Each entry in the vertical bar, such as your Facebook account, for example, is collapsible. Open it up, and you see another subset of options for each account. The Facebook subset of options include News fees, My wall, and Pages, while the Twitter options are Home, Mentions (@s), Sent, Favorite, Direct messages, Retweets, Lists, Searches, and Trending Topics.

When you click any of these options, they appear as vertical streams or columns in Seesmic's main interface, similar to TweetDeck's. Once you're up and running, Seesmic centralizes all the incoming and outgoing messages from the social media sites you've connected to it. 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.

The first time I flicked through all the menus and tabs in Seesmic's desktop app, it overwhelmed me, and it didn't get much better on the second, third, or even fourth time around. The online app is extraordinarily better, much more pared down and as a result, easier to use. And it's not that the desktop app is disorganized—it's just that there's too much process. The Web app gets it right by not throwing everything at you at once.

Although the Web version doesn't creak under the deluge of choices found in the desktop app, Seesmic has omitted one that I would have liked to see: plug-ins. It's perhaps the only advantage the desktop really has over the Web app, so it's a shame you can't optionally install the plug-ins from the settings panel, which would keep them cleanly out of the way while still offering their functionality.

Seesmic Web's Options and Customization

You can invert Seesmic's color scheme from white to black, or switch the preferred language to one of 14 that are offered at the touch of the button, as both options are accessible from their own icons in the main interface. Another icon leads you to the full settings page where you can add more social media accounts, change your password, delete your account, and set up a bit.ly URL shortener Pro Account.

While Seesmic Web is better than the desktop app for being more simplified, the Settings area feels a little too trim—anorexic, almost. The Settings page would be a good place to tuck in more features that Seesmic rightfully left off the main dashboard, but still wanted to provide to users optionally. 

Universal Log In, Please!

One change I'd like to see in all social media aggregators is one login for all the apps. My ideal social media aggregator would be able to save my customizations, streams, and accounts across its own Web version, desktop client, and smartphone app. The various carriers and services (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and so on) would probably require the user to authorize the social network integrations on each device upon first install (hey, that's fine!). The ideal situation would be to set up Seesmic once in the Web app and have that entire account ready when I download the Android or iPhone app and login. Currently I don't believe any of the social media aggregator developers do that, so I hope they’re listening.

Seesmic Web Sized Up

When all else is accounted for, the Seesmic Web app is on par with others in its class. Some (myself included) would prefer a desktop client, but Seesmic's falls short of efficiency, requiring too much time and effort to set up. However, the desktop app does have an amazing library of plug-ins that extend Seesmic's reach to more social sites and services—I only wish the Web app worked with them, too.

Sadly, you never get the best of both worlds with Seesmic. Overall, I like both HootSuite and TweetDeck slightly better than Seesmic. I much prefer a desktop aggregator to a Web-based one because it further compartmentalizes social activity, so TweetDeck is my app of choice. HootSuite has more to offer if you pay for the premium features, but it's an online app (although you can turn HootSuite into a desktop app using Chrome.)

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