Back in the ear­lier days of 3rd party Twit­ter apps (just a few months ago, actu­ally), a few very effec­tive web-based ser­vices got my atten­tion: Social­Too, Tweet­Later, and Hoot­Suite. Sad thing was, while they were all very pow­er­ful ser­vices, they were all poorly designed, very hacked together, and fugly.  Enter the ele­gant, sexy, feature-rich Hoot­Suite 2.0 (no mat­ter what you think about all the con­tro­versy and extor­tion — see below).

Everyone’s talk­ing about Hoot­Suite 2.0

Today, while I was mon­i­tor­ing my stream-o-tweets, I noticed that every third per­son of the 2,587 I cur­rently fol­low were tweet­ing that they “upgraded to #Hoot­Suite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade.” Hoot­Suite — pro­nounced like it sounds (HOOT-sweet) and a play on the French phrase tout de suite — was the first online player to offer multi-Twitter-account man­age­ment and Twit­ter­ing, an essen­tial tool to any busi­ness appli­ca­tion of Twit­ter that required the man­age­ment of more than one Twit­ter account, such as @mar­con, @abra­hamhar­ri­son, @chrisabraham, etc.

Hoot­Suite 1.0 was ugly

I used Hoot­Suite to man­age mul­ti­ple accounts, in spite of very basic, very Web 1.0 forms-based inter­face. Hoot­Suite allowed me to sim­ply pop tweets to one or more account and to man­age as many as I wanted. I used it as I expanded into new accounts. And then there was Seesmic Desk­top, by Loic Le Meur, and now there is Tweet­Deck, both AIR apps that are multi-platform clients that I per­son­ally really love: their ease of use, their look and feel, and their mod­ern design.

Hoot­Suite 2.0 is a hottie

Today, as I alluded to ear­lier, Hoot­Suite got a lot of work done. In fact, I feel like I am in some sort of before and after makeover scene in morn­ing TV.  Hoot­Suite 2.0 is a hot­tie: gor­geous, stun­ning, mod­ern and Ajaxy, inte­grat­ing new lev­els of inno­va­tion that leaves every Twitter-inspired web ser­vices in its tech­no­log­i­cal wake — even Twitter!

Look­ing good even on my small-screen laptop

I run a Lenovo x61 ThinkPad, which only has a 12.1-inch screen, which doesn’t work very well with Tweet­Deck (it just isn’t wide enough). Seesmic Desk­top does a lit­tle bet­ter with a pretty cool “shuf­fling” inno­va­tion. How­ever, Hoot­Suite does it the best, using a reg­u­lar browser to dis­play lots and lots of infor­ma­tion by means of scrollers and tabs, allow­ing every­thing to be con­tained sim­ply and quickly using even my pathet­i­cally small “exec­u­tive” lap­top and might even work swim­mingly in a net­book with a 10-inch screen.

All of the other stuff is crap com­pared to what’s really cool

I have been sav­ing the best for last: Hoot­Suite allows you to cre­ate columns with per­sis­tent search, mean­ing you can keep your eyes on what is going on around your brand, your name, your com­peti­tors, and your industry. Psych!  That’s not the big deal! The big deal is that “you can now take your col­umn with you,” mean­ing you can cre­ate a search for some­thing like #Socialmedia.biz. This is really cool and so inno­v­a­tive!  You can set up your own dash­board, you can shoe­horn the stream into your blog’s or site’s nav bar — lots of stuff. Nobody else offers this, as far as I can tell, and this is a win­ner! The rea­son why we all use and wor­ship YouTube is par­tially because it was one of the first video host­ing sites that allowed one to embed con­tent. You might not know it now, but this is a big deal!

Embed­d­a­ble columns widget

Appar­ently, Twit­ter embed­d­a­ble search, too

Update: Right after I posted this arti­cle, I popped the link to the lovely and bril­liant Adele McAlear, who popped me the note via Google Talk, “I think some­one else does the wid­get… I’ll find it…one sec. Yeah…its Twit­ter them­selves. Cus­tomiz­able. Announced this week based on search.twitter. I’ve already embed­ded one on my blog (which explains why I’ve seen it, smacks head). Yes, the link works in my left side­bar. Cus­tom search terms, sizes, colours, mouse over “join the con­ver­sa­tion” in the wid­get to see the search terms used.”  Well, there you have it!  Here’s the link to the Twit­ter Wid­get Search.

Con­tro­versy

Now, the con­tro­versy: remem­ber that “I upgraded to #Hoot­Suite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade” tweet I have been see­ing all over the Twit­tos­phere?  Well, here’s the con­tro­versy and the genius: if you want to upgrade to Hoot­Suite ver­sion 2 — if you really want to upgrade — then you have to be will­ing to tweet “I upgraded to #Hoot­Suite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade” or there’s no mov­ing for­ward. Coer­cion! Black­mail! Extor­tion! Brilliant! Worth it! Shame­less! Arro­gant! How dare you!

Well, I think it worked.  Just today, there were at least 2,133 men­tions of the Twit­ter hash­tag #hoot­suite, roughly equiv­a­lent to a minor earth­quake or coup d’état insurrection. I mean, it works and it got my atten­tion, it got JD’s atten­tion, and the mes­sag­ing — my mes­sag­ing — wasn’t even the result of a direct mail. And, when I repeated the mes­sage to my 10k+ fol­low­ers, it was will­ingly. I mean, what price tweet­ing to get a glimpse of what every­one is on about.

What do you think?

Update: Blake Samic com­mented that there are parts of Hoot­Suite that I hadn’t yet explored, “I’m inter­ested to see how their ana­lyt­ics engine stacks up to some­thing like ‘su.pr’ (another great scheduled-tweet app). The other inter­est­ing fea­ture I noticed in Hoot­suite was the abil­ity to have mul­ti­ple peo­ple man­ag­ing a Twit­ter account (kind of like Co-Tweet).“Chris Abra­ham is co-founder and prin­ci­pal of Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC, an inter­na­tional con­sult­ing group with spe­cial­ties in online word-of-mouth/conversation mar­ket­ing and online busi­ness & tech­nol­ogy strat­egy advis­ing. See his pro­file, con­tact Chris via email, Twit­ter, or leave a com­ment below.