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The newspaper industry is dying, but that doesn’t mean that our love for newspapers has die as well. Our mental connection with the form and feel of a newspaper is hard to erase. It’s the inherent disability of reading news that happened a day before, instead of knowing it as and when it happens, that hurts [...]

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of using Twitter as both a social platform and a means of archiving my life on the web. I’ve played with using favorites, searches, backup services, my own bots for archiving links and direct messages … I know it goes against the grain of the original vision of [...]

Oh, glorious day. Britney Spears is no longer the Queen of Twitter. She has been toppled from her thrown. A cultural milestone? Perhaps. But wait. The new Queen of Twitter is Lady Gaga. Is that any better? At least she is more entertaining, or at least more self-aware. Sometime last night, her highness Lady Gaga [...]

As we first reported last night, Apple is finally allowing live streaming video applications into the App Store. Apple’s acceptance of the Ustream Live Broadcaster has seemingly paved the way for other live-streaming apps. And one of the best known ones, Qik, is wasting little time to get its app out there. The company writes in a blog post today that they’ve already submitted their app for approval.

I’ve actually had the Qik live-streaming app on my iPhone for a while, thanks to the magic of ad-hoc distribution. Unfortunately, Apple’s policies restrict the number of copies Qik can send this way, so the application remained mostly a proof-of-concept for most people. Given how quickly Qik submitted the app to the store, we expect the official build that will likely get approved to be the same one we have been using, which we reviewed here. It’s solid, but the video quality leaves a little to be desired compared to some competing video apps (none of which did live streaming).

Like Ustream, Qik did release a version of its app that allowed users to upload videos — but not live videos, until now.

Following Ustream and Qik, you can probably expect other companies like 12seconds to get into the iPhone live streaming game as well. Once all these apps are available, the question is how much will people use them? Services like Qik in particular seemed hot among some of the tech elite last year, but this year have seemed to have large cooled off. Perhaps that’s because people have been ditching their Nokia phones (it seemed like everyone was using the N95 with Qik for a while) in favor of devices like the iPhone. Now that these apps are allowed on the iPhone, will we see a resurgence of links to live streams on Twitter again?

Below find some examples of Qik videos I shot with my iPhone 3GS using the ad-hoc version of the app.

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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