Starting out life as a
video blogging website, its original aim was to make video uploading from webcams easier to promote online video conversations. Seesmic made its debut at the
Demo tech conference where it was called the "Twitter of video". It had 20,000 users and 70,000 viewers per month as of 2008. On 3 April 2008, Seesmic announced that it had purchased Twhirl, an
Adobe AIR based
Twitter client. In 2009, Loïc Le Meur, Seesmic's founder, announced that the video portion of the site had stagnated as it struggled to attract new users. He refocused the site, changing the objective from creating a new video social networking site to creating a suite of tools that would instead aggregate content from other social networking sites such as Twitter and
Facebook. The video site, whilst remaining available, was relegated to a different
domain name. Le Meur moved from
Paris to
San Francisco to relaunch Seesmic due to the perception that it would stand a better chance of success there. It was backed by a number of investors, the primary one being Atomico, a venture group that includes
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold
Skype to
eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion. In January 2010 Seesmic acquired
Ping.fm. In March 2010, Seesmic reached 1 million registered users. Seesmic produced a number of social network clients including: • Seesmic Desktop – a cross platform Twitter and
Facebook desktop client written using
Adobe AIR. Version 2 was rewritten in
Microsoft Silverlight and added support for
Google Buzz. • Seesmic Web – a Twitter
web application client for Twitter written using
Google Web Toolkit • Seesmic for
Android – a native Twitter client, Facebook, and Salesforce Chatter client for Android • Seesmic for
Windows Phone 7 – a native Twitter, Facebook, and Salesforce Chatter client for Windows Phone 7 • Seesmic for
iPhone – a native Twitter, Facebook and Ping.fm client for iPhone and
iPod Touch • Seesmic for
BlackBerry – a native Twitter client for BlackBerry – discontinued in June 2011 In August 2011, Seesmic announced it was moving into the
Customer Relations Management business, releasing Android and
iOS CRM apps that interfaced with
Salesforce.com. The former social media apps were being maintained as a "second branch" of the company. In September 2012, Seesmic was acquired by
HootSuite. ==References==