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:

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

- 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?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Seesmic wins at layoff spin [Great Moments In Pr] (valleywag.com)
• New Experimental Seesmic Site (Loïc Le Meur/Loic Le Meur Blog) (techmeme.com)

LeWeb, the European web conference that took place this week is under fire by bloggers and newspapers alike. I didn’t attend the event, but watched part of it online. While some of the reporters covering the event wrote hilarious columns others were attacking its video strategy. Allen Stern, from CenterNetworks wrote:

My beef is that Loic selected Ustream to run live coverage of the conference. There is absolutely no reason that this conference needed to be broadcast live. First, if I paid $2,000 to attend, I’d be pissed that my sister could sit at home and watch it for free.

Allen – content attract people to conferences. However, the main value of events is networking. We can talk about video all day long, but seeing the event streamed over the internet doesn’t provide me any business value. Saying it is wrong to stream it for free, is like asking people not to blog about the event.

But the most annoying statement was that Loic LeMeur, the event organizer and Seesmic CEO doesn’t believe in his own company, because he streamed it by using uStream. As Allan wrote:

Bottom line: If you don’t use your own system, it’s hard to get others to do so.

This point was also echoed in VentureBeat’s post about the event.

Guys – the only thing in common between uStream and Seesmic is the fact that both are video apps (and have a cool webby name that has the letter S in it).

Seesmic is for conversation, like video twitter.

uStream is for event streaming

Seesmic forces users to do short videos in order to facilitate conversions.

uStream is for event streaming

Seesmic is built around threads – again, to facilitate conversation

uStream is for event streaming

Seesmic doesn’t support live streaming

uStream is for event streaming – which means it is all about live video.

Do you see a common line here? Seesmic is not for event streaming, uStream is, and Loic used the right tool for the job.

Could one use Seesmic for events? Yes, especially to create pre and post conference discussions. But from my experience it requires a lot of resources and attention to make it right (we thought about doing so in Rosh Pina Festival as well, but decided to skip it due to time constraints). Could Loic do a better job integrating Seesmic in the conference? Yep, for sure.

But does the fact that Loic LeMeur didn’t use Seesmic in LeWeb show he doesn’t believe in his own company? NO.

Related articles:

• Did Loic LeMeur Just Commit a Kevin Rose?
• Loic Le Meur’s New Startup Launches: Seesmic
• Tough times. Tough decisions. (Loïc Le Meur/Loic Le Meur Blog)
• @ EconSM: Video Interview: Loic Le Meur, CEO, Seesmic: US Beats EU For Innovation
• Seesmic is the place where your social media friends come to life!
• How to mainstream a web app in a hurry: Get Spielberg, Lucas and Ford aboard
• Congrats Loic! Seesmic closes $6 million dollar B Round.

You can find all  Twitter chatter here, the program here, and below is the startup competition stage stream:
Live video chat by Ustream