Seesmic goes Enterprise

CloudBlog caught up with Loic Le Meur, the ebullient founder of Seesmic, a wildly popular social application that enables users to track and update their social networks, including Twitter and Facebook.  During an on-stage dry run on September 7th at Cloudforce London, Le Meur discussed his launch of Seesmic for Chatter, the first tool that combines and aggregates the social feeds from consumer social services and the enterprise, giving users greater control of their true social network. Le Meur, who spends more time in airplanes than on land, can be tracked down on Twitter (@loic).

In this interview, Le Meur makes it clear that social networks are changing the way businesses are run. He also makes it clear that combining the consumer web experience with the enterprise is vastly important, as we have been predicting for many years.  His first and most important enterprise application is the integration of Chatter into the Seesmic Desktop and the Seesmic web and mobile clients. While we didn’t get into it in this conversation, the rise of mobile clients, such as the iPad, Android, and other smartphones, has penetrated the enterprise and is outpacing the use of desktops. To date, according to IDC, 50 percent of the enterprise uses intelligent mobile devices instead of desktops.

Le Meur, while making no specific Nostradamian predictions about the death of email or (gasp) blogs, was clear that in five years they’ll pretty much be gone in favor of real-time collaboration tools. He made no predictions about the death of the web (he runs the popular LeWeb conference December in Paris). But he’s also completely aware that mobile is the future. His company, a “global start-up,” is already on that path. 

Le Meur’s announcement was in the context of a series of mobile and enterprise announcements at Cloudforce London, which will draw over 2400 attendees.