Loic Lemeur Explains the Future of Seesmic [sxsw]

I was actually on my way to the blogger lounge to go catch up on the news yesterday, and fresh from his announcement with Facebook regarding the Seesmic application happened to be Loic Lemeur, founder of the company, sitting in the hallway catching up on his email.

He was gracious enough to sit down with me and chat on camera a bit about his news regarding the new Twhirl-like client for monitoring and updating Facebook status updates.

He covered a lot of the news and information you saw already in many of the reports about the product, including:

• Twhirl will be rebranding itself as Seesmic (they have a hard time as a small company maintaining two brands).
• That means you won’t be a Twhirl user any more, you’ll be a Seesmic user.
• They’re focusing almost half their staff on integrating the new Facebook client into the rest of the site experience.

In addition, he talked a bit about his expectations of how this might transform the usage of Facebook entirely. He hinted here and off-camera that this is the thrust of their focus, and they really want to position themselves as one of the primary ways to access Facebook.

I think, given the addictiveness of Twhirl and Twitter, I think it’s a safe bet.

We also caught up a bit, since the last time we spoke, he was on his way to go visit then-President Bush. He’s since steered clear of politics, but commented on the bit of disappointment he feels when politicians engage greatly with social media tools during campaigns, but not during the governance.

Mark Rizzn Hopkins blogs a Rizzn.com and Silicon Angle.