[Posted on January 2, 2008 - 3:33 PM]
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DiggSeesmic remains several months away from its official launch, but the online video blogging startup is already preparing for the next stage in the company's development: going mobile. Seesmic, which is in alpha and expects to go live in March, plans in February to start testing a service for letting people post "short-form" videos using cell phones and other wireless devices, says company founder Loïc Le Meur.
"We're working on it right now," he says. "We wanted to start with the Web because even though mobile devices are getting better, the Web is still the center. We're starting with the Web, and if we we make it work there mobile is a natural for us."
Le Meur adds that the mobile offering will let users reply to posted videos and provide conversation threads, noting that "if we deliver just video posting, we will be very disappointed with the results."
The buzz is building for Seesmic, in large part because of the illustrious early-stage investors and entrepreneurs backing the company, who include (not necessarily in order of prominence ... or wealth) Michael Arrington, Steve Case, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, Martin Varsavky, Dave Winer and Niklas Zennstöm. There also appears to be a certain fascination with Le Meur, a noted French entrepreneur and blogger, as well as the organizer of popular Internet conference Le Web, who earlier this year moved to Silicon Valley to work on Seesmic. The voluble Le Meur has drawn attention for chronicling the startup's step-by-step development in his daily video posts on Seesmic and YouTube.
Yet there's more here than high-profile angels and disarmingly clever salesmanship. Seesmic, which for now is available by invitation only, has been compared most often to microblogging startup Twitter and been described by BusinessWeek as a cross between Facebook and YouTube. Neither characterization is quite apt. Even the term "microbroadcasting" seems off the mark for what Seesmic (and to a lesser extent other video blogging competitors such as Kyte, Magnify.net and UStream.TV, among others) proposes to do.
In my view, these definitions ignore the obvious, but fundamental, difference between reading and watching (and, by extension, writing and filming). In the former, text is of course the main mode of communication, while the latter trades in images. For example, Twitter has succeeded in part because it's based on something that people already commonly do -- exchange thoughts in writing. The essential contribution of microblogging is to channel that logorrheic impulse into an entire hyper-abbreviated genre -- the diary entry, stray thought, shout out, plea for directions -- that seems perfectly in tune with a world compressed and fragmented by attention digital disorder.
Communicating by video is another kind of beast. For one thing, people don't do it en masse yet because it's not practical. More important, the act of expressing oneself cogently, wittily or, for that matter, even semi-intelligibly on video is something new. Apart from having to speak naturally while staring glassy-eyed into a Webcam, there's something slightly disorienting about being seen, as opposed to being "merely" read, while engaging in generally aimless, but otherwise perfectly agreeable, chitchat on the Web. And that's why Seesmic (and its ilk) is interesting. As Le Meur says, the goal is to enable just this sort of "trivial" conversation.
"It's human nature that people want casual, informal conversation," he says. "People in Seesmic are on video like they are in reality, and that's what is very new. You can't cheat, you don't have makeup or TV lights -- you feel very much like you are. It's as if we were going to the pub or having coffee together. That's very different than TV, and totally different than YouTube because there's no conversation in YouTube."
Jeff Clavier, the noted Web 2.0 investor (see here for his previous exits and current portfolio) and Le Meur's French compatriot, says by email that how people will use services like Seesmic will depend on where they are and what they're doing, with Webcams, cell phones and even cameras all coming into play.
"There are always many occasions that you might want to capture on video, and you will use the device available to you right there and then," he says, while adding that mobile phones will be especially important. "As mobile phones get good enough quality video capture, they will become a device of choice like they are now for photos. I am also amazed at the quality of small wearable cameras like the Sanyo Xacti (waterproof) like the one I just got for Christmas."
Seesmic already has a working prototype of its mobile service working on a Nokia 95 phone and an iPhone (interestingly, they hired the guy who developed the interface).
This post is getting long (wonder how it would've come out in video?), so later I'll publish more from my phone conversation with Le Meur, who has interesting things to say about building online communities and his "open" approach to developing startups. - Alain Sherter
See CrunchBase entry on Seesmic
See Le Meur's video posts on YouTube
See Dec. 17 story from BusinessWeek
See January 2006 story from TheDeal.com
For more see Jeff Clavier's Software Only, TechCrunch, D|All Things Digital, Global Neighborhoods and (for a thorough trashing of Seesmic) 1938 Media
