Seesmic, the video conversation company, is one of the most interesting players in the online video world today. It is lead by Loic Le Meur, a French serial entrepreneur, who is committed to transparency, openness and video. This is how he described his company to Vator.TV:
Loic is practicing what he preaching, to the extent that he asked his community directly what should be the future of Seesmic:
As well as being extremely open about closing Seesmic’s $6M financial round.
Seesmic Beyond Video Comments
However, not everything is bright in Seesmic Nation.
One of the major directions of the company, video comments, didn’t prove to be popular with users. Even though there is a Wordpressplugin for it, it is integrate with Diqus comments plugin, and used by more than 300 blogs including Techcrunch, Usage is slim. It seems that video blog comments are not as simple to use as text. My own push to my blog readers, asking them to leave video comments, was not successful at all. In a conversation with Loic (video chat over Skype) he sounded very positive about the future:
I have time – we are a small team, and we just raised money. As such we have enough time to find out what is working and what is not. We thought that video comments will be the right thing, but it didn’t succeed as expected – so we are looking for the next thing.
Seesmic is planning on strengthening community features by creating closed and moderated video conversation groups. Users would be able to open a group, invite people to it and moderate the video conversation in it. This could be a very valuable feature, as it will enable new use cases:
- Events could create a pre and post event discussions (see my post about this topic)
- With enhanced privacy settings, study groups, classes and teachers could interact in a moderated and safe environment
- Businesses could create a video based user community
I talked with Loic in January, and the community features are planned to be released during February.
Loic is an extraordinary man, with an intriguing vision. I wonder what the future holds for Seesmic. What’s your opinion?
Video comments are never going to be popular because a) Not everyone's good-looking and b) Not everyone's eloquent when they speak to a camera or to the public. People don't like to look bad, and people don't like to look stupid. The people that call-in to radio shows and such wouldn't bother if they knew their grills had to be on television.
As far as the moderated groups, I said that before Seesmic even exited beta testing. There was a lot of talk about the so-called "Seesmic Community", which clearly only existed because at the time, it was a gated community. Once ANYBODY could join, the "Community" was quickly outnumbered and washed away by the TRUE community, which was ANYBODY that wanted to use the service.
The only two options for keeping groups together at that time were sticking to your column of replies from your friends, and a [non-existent] gated community WITHIN Seesmic that was earmarked for the participation of selected members.
Online Video: The Future of Seesmic is Moderated Groups
Seesmic, the video conversation company, is one of the most interesting players in the online video world today. It is lead by Loic Le Meur, a French serial entrepreneur, who is committed to transparency, openness and video. This is how he described his company to Vator.TV:
Loic is practicing what he preaching, to the extent that he asked his community directly what should be the future of Seesmic:
As well as being extremely open about closing Seesmic’s $6M financial round.
Seesmic Beyond Video Comments
However, not everything is bright in Seesmic Nation.
One of the major directions of the company, video comments, didn’t prove to be popular with users. Even though there is a Wordpress plugin for it, it is integrate with Diqus comments plugin, and used by more than 300 blogs including Techcrunch, Usage is slim. It seems that video blog comments are not as simple to use as text. My own push to my blog readers, asking them to leave video comments, was not successful at all. In a conversation with Loic (video chat over Skype) he sounded very positive about the future:
Seesmic is planning on strengthening community features by creating closed and moderated video conversation groups. Users would be able to open a group, invite people to it and moderate the video conversation in it. This could be a very valuable feature, as it will enable new use cases:
- Events could create a pre and post event discussions (see my post about this topic)
- With enhanced privacy settings, study groups, classes and teachers could interact in a moderated and safe environment
- BBC were the first network that used Seesmic to collect viewers’ feedback, edit it and broadcast it. It will be easier to do it with moderated groups
- Businesses could create a video based user community
I talked with Loic in January, and the community features are planned to be released during February.
Loic is an extraordinary man, with an intriguing vision. I wonder what the future holds for Seesmic. What’s your opinion?
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