Is Social Video Chatting The Future?

Posted by Anthony LaFauce on January 18th, 2008 2:38 PM

Darren Waters over a th BBC’s dot.life has presented an interesting article about a potentially revolutionary application called Seesmic. The creator of this software, Loic LeMeur, believes the future of online video is not the standard Youtube/Google Video type model, based on broadcasting, to more narrow casting style.

The model, for lack of a better term is very Twitter like in theory. The long and short of it is this: you send a video to friends on your list, and they reply, I am no rocket scientist but this is a video conversation with no intended target. The pipe dream is that multiple conversations will be built off of a single thread or question.

I like the idea, but I see it having two major flaws, video and anonymity. One of the things I love about twitter is going mobile, tweeting from my phone creates some of the best conversations. To be honest if I am in front of a computer I might as well use some chat client that is much more efficient than twitter.

Video is still not the greatest thing from mobiles. Sure my Q can handle streaming and receiving video, most mobile phones are still sub-par when it comes to receiving streaming video from an online source. Most phones can receive ‘clips’ but the take a bit download and are cumbersome to manage.

The other problem I see might arise is the question of anonymity. People like to blog and chat because there is a certain level of security based on the fact that you hide behind a keyboard. Sure, some people out there like to post video blogs, and have video chats with strangers in other countries, but the bulk of us techo geeks like to hide behind our keyboards.

I could be a complete 180 off on this one. Let me know what you think. Do you think the Seesmic service will take off?

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joelogon 2 years ago 1 point
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It bears repeating -- the time required to consume video continues to be its limiting factor.

Also, it gets problematic with more complex interactions -- multiple participants, or referring back to previous conversations (quoting/replying).

Not to say that video can't still be useful (especially video used in conjunction with text) -- just needs to be in a way that scales.

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Victoria Pickering 2 years ago 1 point
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I don't think that video will make an effective Twitter-like communication tool because it takes far too long to watch video compared to the speed of scanning text. While video is much more interesting and complex than text, I'd guess that the number of conversations one could watch would be far less than 10% of the number of Twitter messages one could skim or read in the same amount of time. What to me would be the most interesting product would be something that combines the complete text of the message (not just tags) paired with optional video - so you can scan through the texts quickly and then choose to watch the videos for a small subset of them.

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