God bless competition: Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck release new features

The Twitter desktop client war is charging ahead at full steam, with both Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck releasing big upgrades, and Tweetdeck offering an iPhone version for the first time.

Seesmic Desktop went first with a release candidate of version 0.3. The new version builds on Seesmic Desktop’s strong foundations by embracing service competition. Along with a strong list of URL shorteners, Seesmic now offers image uploading support for Pikchur, Posterous, TwitPic, Twitgoo & yfrog. Bit.ly support has been extended to include Bit.ly account integration, allowing users tokeep track of URL clicks. There is also a range of visual enhancements and feature improvements.

Market leader Tweetdeck isn’t sitting back and letting Seesmic Desktop grab all the attention though. The biggest change in the new version Tweetdeck is the ability to manage multiple accounts, to date Seesmic Desktop’s biggest selling point. Other features include synchronization with the iPhone client, including search queries, lists etc, improved video playback, a reply all feature, and the ability to block and report spam.

The newly released, free Tweetdeck iPhone client could be the killer difference between the two offerings. Tweetdeck on the iPhone brings the multi-column goodness of the desktop client to the iPhone, and it works so much better than other iPhone clients currently available. The visuals are rich, the feature set is all there, and you can thumb through your columns.

I’m impressed by Seesmic Desktops latest offering, particularly the move to embrace consumer choice among Twitter related services at a time other desktop clients are reducing choice. But Seesmic doesn’t have the iPhone application, and even if it did have one, they’d struggle to come close. With the syncing capability, Tweetdeck looks set to increase its marketshare on the desktop, and quickly take a huge chunk of the iPhone Twitter client market as well.