Seesmic seems to be a largely redundant startup (with excellent execution and PR): so far it has very little value for the world at large; it tries solving a problem that doesn't exist; it's not technically very impressive, nor revolutionary. I think it's mainly a great demo of the silicon valley echochamber at work, and of great PR (both in the Valley, and in Cannes last week)
You're spot on. Let's not forget that Le Meur has a lot of contacts, and a lot of weight in the Valley, and people just love to jump on these kinds of bandwagons.
Creation of needs and all that.
Not that I'm saying it should be put down to rest, just that it won't go anywhere in the mainstream. People that aren't in this horrid social media bubble just aren't looking past Facebook.
He makes a good point, but with Seesmic, I just don't see it going anywhere. Will it really become mainstream? Twitter sure as hell won't, so what chance does Seesmic have?
what's your definition of mainstream and how is that a benchmark of success?
Not many web apps beyond Google, Yahoo, MSFT, Facebook, MySpace have much of a shot going "mainstream."
Most YC companies (in fact, none at this moment) will not go mainstream, yet several have been successful. Even a startup with a lot of traffic, like Scribd, is not mainstream, but it doesn't seem to have negatively affected them.
That was early on. I almost never see them being posted these days.
Vid comments are of lower information content and of higher bandwidth... so they are of higher cost when you consume them. Also, most people don't wanna fix their hair etc to be bothered with them. Seesmic should study why video phones flopped...
i'd say that is valid for the majority of comments on the web. The exception seems to be Hacker News. Obviously that has something to do with the people not the medium, although a text comment is edited a multiple times.
I remember myself when i would scroll through the page of comments and read only the first ones, then suddenly you go through the page and must read all of them.
In the same manner although there were all these video comments i only viewed some.
It's about becoming a habit I guess.
Of course it took 15 years for people to get used or have a reason to text commenting...In few hundred! years maybe people may be will have a reason to use video phones and video commenting.
Also, even if only 100 people ever use Seesmic, you'll see a good number of posts pop up on TechCrunch, especially since Arrington invested in them. If they start popping up on random blogs then I'll be impressed.
Most of the time video comments are useless, and worse, degrade the user's experience.
With text comments I can quickly scan the comments for interesting bits. With video comments I'm at the mercy of the commenter. I have to sit through the whole thing, watching it at whatever speed they choose to speak at rather than whatever speed I can read/scan text. It's also unsearchable.
Additionally, I think people tend to ramble more when they speak than when they're writing text that they can go back and edit.
Most of the time video just doesn't add anything to the discussion. Maybe they would be useful if the commenter needs to physically demonstrate something, or sing or recite a poem or something. But that's not the common case.
Now, if you could automatically transcribe the words from video comments and post it alongside the video (thus making watching the video optional) I wouldn't be so opposed to it. Video certainly has the potential to make the conversation a bit more personal. Sometimes it's nice to put a face to a name/comment (which could also help deter trolls)
(perhaps some sort of combination of speech recognition and crowd-sourcing could be used to transcribe video comments...)
I must be missing something about Seesmic. It's like YouTube but minus the volume slider. But it's integrated with TechCrunch's commenting system. Is that really a competitive edge?
Understood; as others mentioned, the hype seems to do with good PR and Loic knowing a ton of the right people.
Then again, who wouldn't want that attention? I'm sure TipJoy certainly would. The only bloggers I've seen with a TipJoy are either YC founders or HN readers -- which isn't a slant against TipJoy, but I'm sure they could benefit form a hype injection.
I promise not to keep ideas in my head, unfulfilled and full of promise - not to let these vague outlines of future actions give me false confidence and security in the abstract. Instead I will execute them quickly and faithfully so that I am again on the brink of the unknown, hoping that these ideas were not the last that would ever come to me from God knows where.
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