Feb
13
Seesmic is open for your business - but I already left…
February 13, 2008 |
Thanks to its founders amicable nature and good marketing strategy, Seesmic (the “Twitter of online video”) quickly became the talk of the town when the first beta invites were released.
Now, Seesmic not only has received $6 million in funding, but it also opened up the door to the public at large, as Venture Beat reports.
My take on Seesmic is that it looked cool at first but held little value for me in the long run.
I was lucky to get one of the very early invites. At that time, there were maybe a hundred people or so on Seesmic. It seemed like a nice enough group of people and I recorded a video or two. After that, I never went back. I just simply didn’t care to record a video of myself talking to a webcam. I rather write.
At its most basic, transporting the idea of Twitter sounds like a good idea, but in the end, it’s just a rehash of “video email” and an asynchronous conversation by video just doesn’t work as well as the short text messages in Twitter (or SMS and email) do. Just think about how many video emails you receive every day.
Video, as Valleywag wrote today, simply isn’t a very efficient way of communicating, even when the user interface is as pretty as Seesmic’s. VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison has a similar take:
The criticism is that video snippets aren’t as effective as text snippets. Unscripted recordings can be quite boring, and while short messages work with text (as Twitter has shown), videos aren’t as easily consumable. Other companies have tried, and failed, to do so-called “video mail” before. It’s a simple idea, and so if it were viable, it may have already existed.
It also takes a certain kind of personality to record videos of oneself, which raises the entry bar quite high for a lot of people who aren’t as exhibitionistic as the current crop of Seesmicers. This, by the way, is the same reason I never thought podcasting and videoblogs could become as standard as blogging.
So overall, I think Seesmic started as a great idea, but really, how many videos of some dude sitting in a badly lit bedroom in front of his webcam can you watch before you ask yourself why the hell he didn’t just write his thoughts down?
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What’s your opinion of Utterz.com?
It seems like they’re doing the same stuff as Seesmic, only Utterz allows more than just video. I’m totally addicted to Utterz, myself. But I do post more text than videos.
Pete - I like Utterz a lot better (though I don’t have a lot of use for it myself). As you said, it does a lot more than just video and is far more flexible than Seesmic. That said - you are a lot more comfortable with video than I am, so you might actually quite enjoy Seesmic. Did you give it a spin yet?
[…] for awhile, but the appeal seems to wane relatively quickly — at least for me, anyway (and apparently for Frederic at The Last Podcast as […]
Pete, have you tried WorldTV yet? It’s pretty cool!
Frederic: I got an invited from Seesmic about a month ago, but the code didn’t work when I tried to sign up. Since I’m happy with Utterz, I’m not inclined to give Seesmic a try at this point, especially with your less that glowing review.
But maybe I’ll give it a try now that they’re open to everybody.
Marcos: I haven’t even heard of WorldTV–I’ll check it out. Thanks for the suggestion!
Pete, try it at once. I am sure you will like the WorldTV.