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Seesmic just released an update to its popular Twitter and Facebook desktop client that gives users enhanced access to their Facebook accounts. Specifically, Seesmic Desktop 0.6 now allows users to set up columns for Facebook Pages and post to these pages if they are administrators. In addition, Seesmic's Twitter features got a few useful updates, including a 'reply to all' feature and a new column for favorites. Seesmic also announced that yfrog will now become the default picture posting service for all Seesmic applications and that the company's desktop application has now been downloaded over 2.5 million times.

In its current state, Twitter is a strange mix of real-time features like search and the slow polling mechanism that desktop clients use to grab new messages. As Twitter puts a limit on how many times per hour a client can check for updates, most of the conversations on Twitter are slow and arduous. When Seesmic released its new desktop and web applications last week, however, the company also mentioned that its applications would soon be able to update Twitter streams in real time, including @replies and direct messages. While the Seesmic team was tight-lipped about how exactly they are going to do this (maybe by tapping into Twitter's Streaming API?), we can't help but wonder how this will change the dynamics on the service.

Today, Seesmic, the developers of one of the most popular Twitter clients, unveiled a web-based version of Seesmic, as well as a new version of the Seesmic desktop. The web-based version of Seesmic basically recreates most of the features that are currently available in the desktop application. A few features like groups and support for multiple accounts are currently missing (though they will be added soon), but the web app also includes a number of features the desktop client doesn't currently have, including a specialized view for direct messages and syncing persistent searches with a user's Twitter profile. Among other things, the new version of the desktop app now sports a Twhirl-like single-column view, the ability to hide the sidebar, and it uses less memory and CPU power.

When you hear the name Seesmic today, chances are that you are thinking about a Twitter client, but once upon a time, Seesmic was a much-hyped online "video conversation" service. Now, however, after a recent redesign, the Seesmic homepage basically doesn't mention the video service anymore and the video service has moved to its own subdomain. In a new video, Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur, reveals that Seesmic's video conversation site hasn't seen any growth in the last couple of months and that Seesmic plans to focus on its Twitter client in order to give Seesmic, the company, a chance to survive.

Freely moving from one service to the next is clearly part of the nature of the Internet today. On Twitter, Twhirl was the de-facto standard desktop client just a few short months ago, but now, TweetDeck has taken this position. The last version of TweetDeck, however, had some serious memory leaks, which led a lot of users to look for alternatives. Now, in its latest version, TweetDeck has rectified this problem. In addition, TweetDeck has also  brought support for Facebook messaging to the stable version of its application, as well as a number of smaller updates.

This new version comes just in time, as Seesmic, the company behind Twhirl, unveiled its TweetDeck inspired Seesmic Desktop yesterday.