ReadWriteWeb

Can sentiment analysis be as simple as installing a browser plug-in and scrolling down a screen? You bet, and you might want to check out the latest from ViralHeat. In a matter of minutes, you too can be getting in touch with your feelings, or at least the feelings of those folks that you correspond with on Twitter. The tool has been updated to analyze Facebook's fan pages, timeline, news feed and comments.

It's been a crazy conference week with VMworld and Dreamforce '11 going on at the same time. News from those shows have been all over ReadWriteWeb's channels this week, like the VMware vFabric Data Director announcement, and CloudStack going 100% open source.

We also looked at storing Salesforce data locally, and Microsoft's digs at a certain virtualization vendor over cloud computing.

For a conference whose host boldly proclaims, "We live in the post-PC revolution," most of the innovations introduced by partners and third parties at this year's Dreamforce conference are probably best suited for viewing from your favorite PC Web browser.

One huge exception this week comes from Seesmic, which came to fame with its multi-channel social networking tool that became an ecosystem unto itself. This week at Dreamforce, Seesmic is demonstrating its prowess with correlating social data for business, with a CRM platform built on the Salesforce API that's custom-designed for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.

If you use tools such as Radian6 to analyze how the social Web is talking about your company, brands or products, perhaps it might be time to take a look at what you can get for free from the competition ViralHeat. Starting today, they will offer a free developer account good for up to 5,000 connections from their site here.

On the heels of last week's less-than-stellar quarterly earnings report, there's more bad news for Blackberry and RIM today. Seesmic has just announced that, effective June 30, it will no longer support its popular Twitter client on Blackberry.

The words of Seesmic's announcement make the company's rationale clear: the company is discontinuing support for Blackberry "in order to focus development efforts on our most popular mobile platforms: Android, iOS, and WIndows Phone 7."

Seesmic, a third party client for Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, updated its iPhone app today. One the biggest additions is support for Salesforce.com's Chatter service. Seesmic has offered Chatter support in its desktop application since September, and beta support for Chatter is already available on Android. Seesmic also added support for in-line previewing of Instagram photos.

Salesforce.com launched its own Chatter iPhone app in September. But for individuals or teams that need support for multiple social networks, this new app could be a boon.

Open source social network framework Elgg (like WordPress for Facebooks) is now supported by social media client app Seesmic, according to an announcement on the Seesmic blog this morning. With the addition of the Elgg plug-in, Seesmic users can now view and update multiple Elgg networks in the same interface they use for Twitter, Facebook, Ning and numerous others. That's good news for Seesmic, which is in a very competitive market.

Elgg is good for groups interested in creating niche networks under their own control, either publicly or privately. The service can run on your own servers or through a hosted version just launched last Summer. It came from the Education world and is used today by various organizations including Oxfam, Hill & Knowlton PR, the Australian government and the state of Ohio. Seesmic is a Salesforce-backed social network meta-service, allowing users to interact with multiple networks on multiple platforms.

Seesmic and Yammer announced today a plugin that brings Yammer's enterprise microblogging and social networking tool to Seesmic's desktop social media application. In addition to making Yammer more appealing to companies that also use external social media, the integration helps Seesmic differentiate itself from other social media dashboards by offering more internal collaboration options.

Seesmic users can download the plugin from the marketplace section of the Seesmic Desktop app. The Seesmic Web client and various mobile clients do not yet have Yammer support.

Seesmic is entering a new phase by offering SaaS services through its platform.

This past week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Seesmic Founder Loic LeMeur showed the integration with the SaaS service and the consumer application.

It's a turn for Seesmic. It could be a significant one, too, as Dennis Howell pointed out today. It puts the company in an enterprise market that may be just ready enough for the acceptance of consumer grade services for social communications.

At last year's Microsoft PDC, Seesmic announced that it was working on a major Silverlight-based rewrite of its desktop clients for Windows and Mac. After almost a year of development, the company just launched the final version of Seesmic Desktop 2. While it was still possible to describe Seesmic Desktop as a social networking client until today, the new version clearly aims to be far more than that. Thanks to a new plugin architecture and marketplace, you can now also use the application to track breaking news on TechMeme, listen to music on Last.fm and browse your news feeds with the help of the Google Reader plugin. In essence, Seesmic Desktop is now a platform for all things real time.