Last week on the Howard Stern show, Howard was trying to grasp twitter.  He was explained how it was the new and fastest way to communicate with his fans, so he told his producer, Gary to post a video of his dog on the twitter account.  Throughout the show, Howard checked back with Gary and they had yet to figure it out.  Finally they posted a link to the video hosted on their own server.

The twitter timeline is exclusive to just text and links.  There have been third party workarounds that have become standards by the twitter community for pictures and music, twitpic and blip.fm respectively, but video is still anyone’s game.

One of the players is Seesmic. Seesmic takes the idea of Youtube video responses and combines them with the timeline and followers structure of twitter.  The functionality of seismic is identical to twitter, just adding video clips.  Where the profile pic is currently in twitter, it is replaced by a small playable embedded video. This is a really interesting design choice and something I could see twitter integrating into their own service eventually. Everytime a person posts a Seesmic video, it tweets on twitter with a link.

A person makes a video post and then others respond to it with other video posts. This allows for longer responses, but very boring video. Few on Seesmic seem to be asking, “what does video offer me?” Instead, they sit at their desks, with unkempt hair and miscellaneous posters on the wall behind them and just talk at the camera.

The biggest issue with Seesmic is that it offers no way to record while on the go other than a laptop with a webcam. Everyone is having these discussions while sitting at a desk on a keyboard.  Few are showing us pictures, events, anything other than a talking head. Imagine twitter without the smartphone and sms ability. It would be a lot of updates saying “reading emails” or “reading nytimes.com” and that is exactly what Seesmic is, but instead of a 2 second read, it takes 3 minutes to watch the video.

Another interesting service is 12seconds.tv. 12seconds.tv is basically identical to Seesmic, but allows you to posts a 12 second video post on your twitter stream from your mobile phone or computer. The 12 seconds limitation is similar to the 140 characters in twitter, adding some brevity to the videos. On Seesmic, I have seen 5-6 minute videos of talking heads. 5-6 minutes is a long time to hear someone ramble.  It is also a creative way to take strain off of the service’s servers.

A service that I see taking the twitter video crown is Qik.  Qik has the same functionality of Seesmic, but allows you to update from a wide variety of smartphones.  The Qik public videos are full of people at parties, concerts, conferences… doing things! It also uses the smartphones GPS and shows a map with the exact location the stream is coming from.

The discussion angle is still there, in fact even more so.  Qik videos stream live, so if Qik or Twitter followers see someone is streaming a video, they can watch and posted comments that show up live on the phone’s screen.


Seesmic is an interesting idea, but I do not see it growing outside of its current niche group while it remains tied to the computer.