After a year’s worth of work, Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur just announced the launch of Seesmic Desktop 2 (SD2), a desktop client that goes beyond Twitter; “We want to be the first platform for platforms,” says LeMeur.

Running on Silverlight (to install go here), the desktop app now has plugin architecture that supports the columizing of a multitude of content streams including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, Flicker, Klout, Formspring, Myspace, Google Reader (!) Salesforce Chatter, E-Bay, Last.fm and so on and so forth.

With this latest iteration it looks like Seesmic has found a way beyond the stigma of being just a one-trick, Twitter-platform pony, “The inspiration to build SD2 came from the understanding that our users desired support of many different social services, more than just Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin” LeMeur writes on his blog and in fact you can customize the app any way you like, “If you don’t like Foursquare, you can filter out Foursquare.”

Seesmic has also gone the way of the App Store and has developed a plugin Marketplace, where you can search and download your favorite news-viewing or social interaction plugins. Note: There’s a bit of turbulence in the installation process as you needlessly have to restart Seesmic Desktop in order to get the plugins to initially load.

Seesmic plans on launching payment options next year, but for the moment all plugins are free. And as Seesmic Desktop 2 is an open platform, LeMeur expects many more, “If all goes well there will be hundreds,” he tells TechCrunch hinting at more to come like E-Bay, ZenDesk, Gowalla, Visa, Blippy and Mint.

To encourage this he has built a SDK, offered up the Seesmic team for those companies that don’t have the chops, and hired third-party developers tequilarapido to build some of the more popular plugins like YouTube and Google Reader.

Alongside Seesmic Desktop UI mainstays like URL shortening, Search, Multiple Accounts, Lists, Photos/Video Twitter integration, and accounts support for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Buzz, the most exciting new features being launched here are individual to each plugin. And while it would take forever to get into into each one, I will bring up some of the most notable.

YouTube

The YouTube plugin allows you to share and watch video within your Seesmic app, and enables you to keep tabs on your Favorites, Most Popular, etc.

Last.Fm

You can now listen to music through the Seesmic client, if you have a Last.fm Pro account.

Zappos

With the Zappos plugin, perhaps the first social commerce plugin, anytime someone tweets a Zappos link you can see the item and buy it — If a Zappos link is tweeted by someone you follow you cab now see all product information in your streams.

Techmeme

You can now view the tech news aggregator entirely on Seesmic, including discussion and related links.

Klout

The Klout plugin includes a small box under tweets in your stream which allows you to see the “Klout” or “influence” rank of of people who are tweeting.

Google Reader

Seesmic Desktop supports all Google Reader features, you can open any RSS and now use Seesmic as an RSS Reader.

Seesmic, which has received 12 million dollars in funding thus far, plans on monetizing Desktop 2 both from eventual Marketplace sales as well as with a classic freemium model which has at its core deep integration with the enterprise software and B2B space, which is where plugins like Salesforce Chatter and ZenDesk fit in. As TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher said about the Chatter integration, “It’s like the link enterprise and the realtime social web just got invented.”

LeMeur also plans to take many of the Seesmic Desktop 2 features, and port them over to the iPhone/Android platforms next year. Windows 7 mobile will come first, since it’s the most compatible system with Silverlight.

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Authors: Alexia Tsotsis

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