This last week the competition for best Twitter desktop application tightened. As far as I was concerned TweetDeck was my favorite with its multiple columns and configurability. Then Seesmic, makers of Twhirl released a beta (of course) of their Seesmic Desktop application and the picture was not as clear cut any longer. And then TweetDeck released a newer version of their app claiming to have fixed some of the previous bugs. Time to test…

Seesmic Desktop 

User Interface

Seesmic Desktop is in many ways an upgrade of the excellent Twhirl application. For many the beauty of Twhirl lays in its simplicity and an obvious concern would then be that a multiple column desktop app would be too busy. Well, no worries. As you can see from the screenshot below Seesmic Desktop is not too busy and a nice looking application. Personally, I like the rather colorful application as opposed to the rather dark default TweetDeck theme.

When you open the Seesmic Desktop the first time you only have the Home column open. To add more columns  you will have to either choose some of the other immediately available options like Replies and Private, or make your own Userlists or Searches. After having done that you move the new column you have opened to the right by clicking the icon in the upper right corner of the column. After you have moved the column from the “home” position you can close it by clicking the new button appearing in the same place.

As in most twitter applications you have the choice of adding URLs or picture from within Seesmic Desktop.

When you choose to add a URL you are offered a dropdown menu with three URL shorteners; bit.ly, digg.com and is.gd.

If you want to add a picture Seesmic Desktop offers multiple choices. You can browse your computer for a picture, you can drag and drop a picture onto the dialogue box or you can take a picture with your webcam.

The resulting image is just stunning, eh? 😉

As in TweetDeck the user Avatar hides multiple choices; Reply, DM, Retweet and special choices.

In the special choices menu you can then choose to Favor an item, add to a userlist or to block a user.

The option to add a user to a userlist is the only way to add users to such lists, which in my opinion is one of the weakest points of this application. There is no way to add multiple users to userlists in an easy way, like it is in TweetDeck. After having made such a list, I should in all fairness add that Seesmic Desktop offers a much easier way than TweetDeck to remove users from a userlist; Just choose the option Users and click the remove button to the right of the username; brilliant in its simplicity.

Configurability

There aren’t too many options for a user to configure in Seesmic Desktop. You can add multiple twitter accounts, you can adjust the twitter API usage and you can make some adjustment to how and if notifications are displayed. Under the language tab you can choose between English and… er… just English (more are probably coming?) and under the Advanced tab you can opt in for automatic updates. That’s pretty much it.

Interaction with other services

Well this should be easy to cover; there really are no other services than Twitter that can be used with Seesmic Desktop as I am writing, although I believe that more services will be added in the future considering Seesmics track record when it comes to Twhirl.

TweetDeck

User Interface

TweetDeck has reached version 0.25b and has been my choice of twitter desktop application for a while now. The UI hasn’t really changed in this version, although it has gotten a new application icon with a yellow background as opposed to the transparent background they used to have.

As before you have the multiple columns with they grey/black interface. One new feature is the ability to post status updates to your Facebook account and of course being able to see your Facebook friends updates as well.

The top button row now looks like this, with the following choices; Tweet, All Friends, Replies, Direct Messages, Favorites, Groups, Search, Twitscoop, 12seconds, Stocktwit and Facebook Friends. Clicking on one of these buttons will open the corresponding column.

If you choose to Tweet the input box opens and from there you can tweet or update your Facebook status, as well as shorten and add URLs or pictures already on your PC/Mac.

When it comes to URL shorteners TweetDeck offers more options than Seesmic Desktop, you can choose from bit.ly, digg, is.gd, tinyurl, tr.im and twurl.

Where Seesmic has its userlists TweetDeck has its groups. TweetDecks way of choosing who goes into each group is far superior to that of Seesmics. You get a scrollable list of everyone you follow and can tick off the ones you want.

As I mentioned above each persons avatar also offers choices; as with Seesmic you have Retweet, Reply, Direct Message and Other actions. Other choices in TweetDeck offers more choices than Seesmic does; The User choice gives you the ability to Add to Group, Follow, Unfollow, View Profile and Search, while the Tweet choice offers the following; Favorite, Email Tweet, Translate, Untranslate, Mark as Read and Delete.

Configurability

TweetDeck offers a lot of options in their Settings panel as the following screenshot clearly shows and are thus much more configurable than Seesmic Desktop is at the time of writing.

Interaction with other services

As mentioned above TweetDeck now offers the possibility through Facebook Connect to show your Facebook friends status updates as well as posting new updates for your own Facebook account as well. Furthermore you can now post short videos directly from TweetDeck through the 12seconds service.

Conclusion

Before I get to my conclusion on which of these two applications will be my choice as I continue twittering I have to get a little into the memory use of each of them. TweetDeck claims to have fixed its problems of memory leaks in this version and are also claiming to have limited its memory usage to around 100Mb. As you can see from the following screenshot that is not exactly the case; TweetDeck consumes approximately 160Mb while Seesmic only consumes half at roughly 85Mb. While it differentiates the two applications this is hardly a problem on modern systems with 2 GB RAM or more…

So…

What do I think?

I actually like both of them. Seesmics UI is more pleasing to my eyes, while TweetDecks configurability and more ease of use appeals as well. When it comes down to it, I think that a silly little thing like the way you can add people to userlists in Seesmic will cause me to continue to use TweetDeck in the future. But, and this is a big BUT;

I highly recommend both applications for active twitterers.

You can get TweetDeck here, and Seesmic Desktop here.

This article was originally written by Pål Joakim Olsen in norwegian for DinSide. The article was released as a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike and has been translated and republished here under the same CC-license.

Microsoft has offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the creators of the Conficker worm. This clearly indicates how dangerous this worm is considered to be.

And tomorrow is D-day. On 1 April Conficker.C strikes. The date is hardly random, since most headlines on that day is not necessarily taken seriously. What makes the Conficker worm extra dangerous is that on top of blocking access to security-related web-sites it also blocks many AV suites and programs as well as Windows Update.

It is estimated that as many as 10 million Windows machines around the world are ticking bombs. It is not well known the full extent of what will happen tomorrow,  but we do know that infected computers will “phone home” to a number servers to get instructions (250 new URLs are aggregated daily, and rumors has it that by tomorrow the total will be around 50.000). So basically the infected computers is part of a giant botnet that is under the control of the creators of the Conficker-worm.

The issued instructions will make the infected computers to start a process – which process is not yet known – it will probably take down large parts of the internet, but it may also perform unwanted local changes to the infected computers.

This is serious. Your computer might be infected, and nobody knows exactly what might happen tomorrow.  Fortunately, by investing a few minutes now you can safeguard yourself from whatever is supposed to happen tomorrow.

Here are some of your options;

Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool

Microsoft recommends Windows users to download the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool manually. This tool can then be run in order to remove malicious software, among them the Conficker-worm.

F-Secure Easy Clean

F-Secure has a free tool to kill the Conficker-worm and you can find it here

McAfee Stinger

McAfee has made a special version of their Stinger-tool which is tailor-made to handle the Conficker-worm. You can find it here.

Panda ActiveScan

Panda has a web-solution that does not require neither download or installation, and you can run it from here. According to the Panda approximately 6% of those who ran this check were infected with the Conficker worm.

or…

Use OpenDNS!

DinSide has covered OpenDNS earlier, and to put it simply, with OpenDNS you can surf the net both quicker and safer by changing the IP-adress from your Internet Service Providers to the ones provided by OpenDNS. (this is easier than it sounds)

OpenDNS cooperates with Kaspersky Lab in order to update the list of malicious servers daily, so that your computer (infected or not) will not be able to connect with those servers.

URL: http://www.opendns.com
The article covering it (in Norwegian) can be found here.

Do the internet and your friends a favor: Tell them about this article!

Personally I recommend the following; update Windows regularly (automatic updates) and use an updated and good AV-suite, I use and recommend Norton Internet Security 2009.

This Microsoft illustration shows how the Conficker-worm operates.

UPDATE:

Ed Bott has written a scathing article over on ZDNet where he ridicules McAfee for their Conficker site. And rightly so: the URL are conspicious to say the least (see the link above) and the About section is just hilarious. So I rec0mmend you follow Eds advise and go somewhere else for your security!

Downloaded Win 7 Build 7068 last night, and upgraded from 7057 this morning. The process took a little more than 2 hrs this time around too. Have just started to use this build so I will post later about my experiences with it, but here are some screenshots;

As you can see from the About Windows information it is Build 7068 which was built on March 21.

I am not sure whether this is the final IE8 or not, its build # is 8.0.7068.0

The Games Explorer has gotten a new icon

One change for me on WMC is that the option to watch internet TV is gone… Anyone else?

Nothing new here…

Must admit that I am not sure whether there are any new pictures here…

This is how Paint looks in this build…

Windows DVD Maker

Well, that’s it for now. I will post more on my experience with this build later…