Today I got my invite for Seesmic. What's Seesmic? Well, you're supposed to think of it as the video equivalent of twitter, but for now it's a place for you and lots of other people to upload short videos -- mostly of yourself, fumbling to talk about anything over than yourself (it's hard):
Seesmic is in 'pre-alpha' which is a new one for me, but so far the features that are available have worked well.
Once I got my invite, from Julia Patricia Roy, queen of the internets and wearer of awesome hair (I promised her I would say she is awesome, and give a good compliment about her hair if she invited me), I scrambled to get my first 'Smic' online. (I'm copywriting that phrase, and just in case, the verb forms as well -- smic, smict, smuc't? needs some work)
I could have used one of our cameras here, but instead opted for my cell phone -- which led me down the path of having to upload the video to youtube and then over to seesmic. But first, I got to try out many of the webs online video editing sites, such as jumpcuts by yahoo, or Eyespot (here's the top list of video editing sites by techcrunch).
Video sites such as this seem to be the v.c.'s hot topic right now, but there are definitely some obstacles to overcome before Seesmic or any others can become a robust community/sexy investment. We've already seen that the explosive growth of Youtube seemed to have more to do with clips people saw offline and followed on than the community by itself. Community propelled growth, but right now Seesmic has no functionality to relate users or content to one another.
If Seesmic wants to foster robust community, it needs to succeed in the following ways:
- Scanning -- I can scan text, but I can't scan videos, yet. As users, we need to do be able to scour information or videos more quickly, or spend less time viewing non-relevant content. Seesmic can do this in various ways, including 1) tagging videos by the author and by the community, 2) adding geographic data to the videos, 3) creating deep profile systems that better relate users and tools like twitter blocks, 4) complete text transcripts and mathematical content relationships.. anyone want to take that task on? It's a doozy.
- Sharing -- As Joshua Porter points out, the way to achieve those 'elephant math' like numbers is to be incredibly smart about how you build content sharing capabilities.
- Gaming --Building upon sites like ImInLikeWithYou and their use of point driven participation and gaming (dating as gaming, as Josh Spear says). Seesmic or others could take this type of activity on -- points for uploads, points for sharing, points for creating games (where the questions and answers are in video-format), and points for winning games -- in order to build a participation crazed community.
What do you think?
What do sites like Seesmic need to do in order to succeed?
Should I stick to straight text-blogging? Better equipment? Something worthwhile to say?
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