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For Mac OS X users, desktop social media clients almost always involve a trade-off. We can either use multiple apps to update our profiles and services or we can use programs like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop that work with lots of services, but rely on Adobe AIR and thus have a tendency to eat up memory and bog down our processors.

Earlier this year, an app called EventBox entered the Mac marketplace as an option to fix this quandary. It was a native Mac OS X app but allowed users to access and update multiple social services. In October Realmac Software acquired the app and renamed it Socialite. Over the last two months, Realmac has worked to refine the interface, add features like Twitter Lists and just generally give the whole client a good coat of polish. Today Socialite 1.0 is available for download.

Multiple Services, One Clean Interface

As we’ve discussed in previous preview articles, Socialite handles Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Google Reader and standard RSS feeds. What’s nice about Socialite is that you can view information from all of these services in one clean interface, without getting bogged down by columns or multiple windows.

Check out this video from Realmac that shows off how to add an account to Socialite:

Photos, Retweets and Lists

Since we last wrote about Socialite, Twitter Lists support has been enhanced to support lists you subscribe to, as well as lists you have already created. Creating lists and managing lists is a feature that Realmac is considering for a future update, but it isn’t available in the 1.0 release.

Socialite uses Twitter’s new RT system. You can do this by either hitting a key-command or selecting RT from a tweet’s option bar. You get confirmation of a Retweet by the appearance of a translucent black bar just above the status update menu. This is how Retweets look in Socialite:

One of the nicest features of Socialite is its integration with both Flickr and Facebook’s photo systems. Lots of Facebook clients can offer ways to update status messages and view status messages from others — and even view photos in-line — but uploading photos or viewing photographs in a more album like manner isn’t a common feature.

Socialite lets you upload and also view photos in both Facebook and Flickr in an easy to browse kind of way. For users who don’t like using the web uploaders, the ability to upload and tag within Socialite is really nice.

HUD Option

Socialite’s main interface window is uncluttered and easy to navigate, but if you are low on screen real estate or just want an easy way to see what’s going on with a particular feed, you can use the HUD, or Heads Up Display, option. It’s a nice alternative to having the full menu and you can perform almost every action from the main interface within the smaller HUD column.

Overall

Socialite is a solid Mac app with a great look and feel and great integration with different social services. We would love to see LinkedIn added as a supported service, especially now that they have an API, but Socialite covers the gamut of the most widely-used social platforms. Socialite is $20 but you can try the program out for free.

Have you used Socialite? What are your favorite social media clients for Mac OS X? Let us know!

Tags: digg, facebook, flickr, mac software, realmac, Socialite, twitter

One of the more intriguing aspects of Google Wave – the much anticipated communication and collaboration platform that debuts later this month – is the fact that Waves can be embedded anywhere on the Web.

Waves, in case you’re not familiar, are essentially individual threaded conversations that take place within Google Wave. So, when we’re talking about an embeddable Wave, it means a conversation that can be placed on other websites, with the same functionality as it would have within Wave itself.

Since some developers already have access to Google Wave, we’re now able to show you what this functionality looks like – and how you may be seeing it in the future – via a WordPress plugin that has already been built for easily embedding Waves in blog posts.

Embeddable Waves

You’ll only be able to see the embed in action if you have a dev account for Wave, so here’s a screenshot of what the end result looks like, via a post on Mastering Wave:

It might not be much to see yet, but here are a few key things not readily apparent: (1) it’s editable, meaning the audience you’re sharing the embed with can make changes (2) it’s drag and drop, so that same audience can also easily add content (3) it can be played back, so you can see how the Wave has evolved over time. Taking all of these features into consideration, you can see why we think it’s possible Wave could become a new type of commenting system for the Web.

Google Wave WordPress Plugin

And that brings us back to the WordPress plugin, dubbed Wavr. Once installed, the plugin lets you easily add Waves to any WordPress blog post with the simple syntax – [wave id="wave-id"] – where “wave-id” is simply the unique ID number given to each Wave. There are also some simple options for editing the Wave’s appearance, like background and text colors. The plugin was built using the Google Wave Embed API.

The simplicity of the plugin and the way it extends the functionality of Wave to third-party websites is a great example of what might be to come with Google Wave. It’s not just a shiny new interface for Gmail, but a whole new way of envisioning communication on the Web. Is the world ready for it? That’s a question we’ve been asking, and probably the main reason Google is being so deliberate with the rollout.

Starting on September 30th, 100,000 users will get access, and how they use it will dictate a lot about the product’s future and how we might see it evolve. Developers are clearly pretty stoked about it though – Wavr joins a growing number of extensions and apps that have already been built for the platform pre-launch, which you can check out in the Wave Samples Gallery.

Google Wave Resources

Tags: Google, Google Wave, Wordpress, wordpress plugins