Seesmic for iPhone is now available for download in the App Store. The application allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook and Ping.fm (which in turn gives you the option to update platforms like MySpace, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Flickr and Blogger).

With Seesmic for iPhone, you can:

• see your mentions, direct messages, and friends’ timelines
• customise your dashboard by adding multiple pages of “spaces” showing accounts, searches, trending topics, lists and so on

• easily switch between accounts on different social networks

• post to multiple social networks at the same time

• read your live Facebook feed

• like and comment on friends’ Facebook posts

• save messages and updates to Evernote

• add geolocation information to your updates
• search through tweets, user profiles and trending topics, and save searches to your dashboard

• configure your dashboard to include Twitter Lists

• choose the format you’d prefer to use for retweets – use the Quote feature to add comments to retweets

• post a photo from your gallery or capture a new one directly through the app

Get the new Seesmic for iPhone free in the App Store. Seesmic is also available for Android, BlackBerry and desktop.

Amidst plenty of discussion and unhappiness around Facebook’s attitude towards user privacy and control, a group of four college students in New York are raising money to build an alternative social network called Diaspora, which they say will be “an open-source personal web service that will put individuals in control of their data”.

Their original goal was to raise $10,000 by 1 June, using the fundraising platform Kickstarter. They reached that goal in just 12 days.

And now, with more than two weeks to go till the deadline, current pledges on their Kickstarter page total $128 496.

Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy are going to be spending their summer break coding away furiously, as the next goal is to complete the core application in time for a September 2010 release.

In short, Diaspora will allow individuals to set up their own node within the network, and to maintain complete control and ownership of anything they choose to share on that node. Here’s a video of Daniel, Maxwell, Raphael and Ilya explaining the concept:

A number of new features were announced yesterday at Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco. The most notable of these include the following social plugins:

1. The new “Like” button, which will be implemented on external sites across the web, including, for now, NYTimes.com, IMDb, CNN.com, TIME.com, LIFE.com, Fandango, NHL.com, USA Networks, Levis.com, Univision and ABC.com. When the user “likes” a product or article on one of these sites, that action will be shared with their friends on Facebook, and their friends will be able to comment on it there. In some cases, such as with IMDb, an item that is “liked” will be added to the user’s profile page under their interests. The item – in this case a movie – will then be able to send the user updates through their News Feed on Facebook.

2. Working alongside the new Like button, the Activity Feed surfaces the actions a user’s friends are taking on a website. If a user is logged into Facebook and then visits a site with this feature implemented, they will be able to see the articles and topics on the site that their friends are sharing, recommending and commenting on.

3. The Recommendations feature will highlight the content on the external site that is most popular with Facebook users, based on the number of “likes” each item receives.

Is Apple finally targeting the lucrative Social Networking business? The big question has a lot of confusing answers and the latest speculation to add to that long list of answers — after the Paypal killer, is that Apple is keen on tying iTunes with a social application that should release to the market in the near future (whatever that means).

The application will be similar to Yahoo One Connect and will be capable of consolidating all social networking services.

As a consequence you will be able to broadcast what music you are listening to and you could even share music with people on your network. Not just that, you could connect with your friend’ friends and update all your statuses at one go. In combination with iTunes 9, your music status could also be broadcasted.

The problem with all these is that nothing is confirmed, which just leaves us in a state of jeopardy for now.

[via BGR]