Seesmic

Loic Le Meur's video Twitter that became a Twitter client that became a Salesforce app and was finally sold to HootSuite for its users

Acquired & killed
19902026

Seesmic was a San Francisco company founded by French blogger and entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur. It began in late 2007 as a video conversation site, the "Twitter of video", bought the Twhirl client in 2008 and turned into a suite of desktop, web and mobile clients for Twitter and Facebook, reaching a million registered users by 2010. In 2011 it pivoted to a Salesforce CRM app, and in September 2012 it was sold to HootSuite, which retired the Seesmic products.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2007
  2. November 2007 Launch
    Seesmic video alpha

    Threaded video conversations.

  3. 2008
  4. 3 April 2008 Acquisition
    Seesmic buys Twhirl

    The Twitter client becomes the business.

  5. 2009
  6. April 2009 pivot
    Seesmic Desktop; video site set aside
  7. 2010
  8. January 2010 Acquisition
    Seesmic buys Ping.fm
  9. March 2010 Peak
    One million registered users
  10. 2011
  11. August 2011 pivot
    Seesmic CRM on Salesforce
  12. 2012
  13. 6 September 2012 Acquisition
    HootSuite buys Seesmic
  14. 2013
  15. 2013 Shutdown
    Seesmic apps retired

    Users moved to HootSuite.

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: seesmic.com, 2 June 2010 →

Browse seesmic.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Seesmic, Inc. 2007–2012 Founded Loïc Le Meur, Paris then San Francisco
HootSuite 2012–2013 Acquisition Bought for the user base; the apps were retired

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts ▲ 1 million March 2010 Reported Announced by the company

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Seesmic changed what it was three times in four years: a video conversation site in 2007, a family of Twitter and Facebook clients from 2009, and a Salesforce CRM app from 2011. None of them made money. HootSuite bought the company in September 2012 for its user base and the Seesmic apps were retired during the following year.

Our analysis: Each of Seesmic's lives was killed by the platform it sat on. Video comments could not get past a small crowd of early adopters once Twitter itself took off. The desktop and mobile clients had a real audience, a million registered users by March 2010, but Twitter bought TweetDeck in 2011 and began limiting third-party clients, so a company whose product was a better window onto Twitter had no floor under it. The CRM pivot was a sensible retreat into a paying market that was already owned by Salesforce itself. HootSuite, which had stayed on the business side from the start, bought what was left.

History [edit]

Three products, one name

Loïc Le Meur had sold a blogging company to Six Apart and was one of the best-connected people in European tech when he started Seesmic in Paris in 2007. The first Seesmic, in alpha from November 2007 and shown at Demo in 2008, was a site where you recorded short webcam videos in reply to other people's videos: threaded video conversation, with a crowd of a few tens of thousands of regulars. It raised money from Atomico, the fund of the Skype founders, and Le Meur moved the company to San Francisco.

In April 2008 Seesmic bought Twhirl, a popular Adobe AIR Twitter client, and that turned out to be the real business. Le Meur admitted in 2009 that the video site had stalled and rebuilt the company around social media clients: Seesmic Desktop in April 2009, Seesmic Web, then apps for Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone, each showing Twitter, Facebook and later Google Buzz and Salesforce Chatter side by side. Seesmic bought Ping.fm in January 2010 and hit a million registered users that March, and for a while it was the main rival to TweetDeck.

Squeezed out

Twitter bought TweetDeck in May 2011 and made it clear that it did not want other companies building general-purpose clients. Seesmic's answer, in August 2011, was to become a CRM company: Seesmic CRM for Android and iOS sat on top of Salesforce and the social apps were kept on as a second line. On 6 September 2012 HootSuite announced it had bought Seesmic. HootSuite wanted the users, not the code, and the Seesmic apps were wound down over the following year while customers were moved to HootSuite.

The domain today

seesmic.com redirects to HootSuite.

Similar projects

MySpace A place for friends 2003–now Google+ The social network everyone was signed up to and nobody used 2011–2019 Friendster The social network that came first 2002–2015 Bebo The $850 million write-off 2005–2013 Yik Yak Anonymous, local, and impossible to moderate 2013–2017 Orkut Brazil's living room, built in a 20% project 2004–2014

Sources [edit]

  1. HootSuite CEO: we are buying Seesmic for the users, not the tech TechCrunch 6 September 2012
  2. Seesmic acquires popular Twitter AIR client Twhirl TechCrunch 3 April 2008
  3. Seesmic Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
  4. seesmic.com in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive 1 June 2010

Last verified: 22 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).