Facebook Pages in Seesmic Desktop 0.6
Facebook Pages — We're excited to share with you a new feature that will allow Seesmic Desktop to access and manage your Facebook Pages. In version 0.6, you now can view and manage any Facebook Page you follow.
Context & Ripple Effects
Seesmic built its desktop business on being a front end for other companies' social graphs: Loic Le Meur founded the company in 2007 (announced that October), and the Facebook desktop client it shipped in March 2009 handled personal profiles and streams.
Version 0.6 extends that same client to Facebook Pages, letting users view and manage any Page they follow. The move leans on the openness Facebook signaled back when Dave Winer argued Facebook was opening up — third-party clients live or die on how much of the platform's surface the API exposes.
First-order effects
- Page administrators who use Seesmic Desktop can now read and manage their Facebook Pages from the same window as their personal feed, removing the need to switch to facebook.com for routine Page work.
Second-order effects
- Competing desktop clients must match Pages support to stay credible with brands and community managers, making API coverage of Facebook objects a feature checklist rather than a differentiator.
Third-order effects
- If platforms keep exposing Page management through public APIs, brand publishing and moderation tools will consolidate inside third-party dashboards, shifting the access layer for business social media away from the networks' own sites.
The trend: Third-party desktop clients are expanding from reading personal streams to operating full business accounts on top of open platform APIs.