
Seesmic: Why it's so important to just frackin' start - keener
http://www.calacanis.com/2008/05/25/seesmic-why-its-so-important-to-just-frackin-start/
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flipbrad
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)

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chrisbroadfoot
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.

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chrisbroadfoot
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?

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volida
well you should look here <http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/25/twitter-2/>

and see the number of video comments

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nickb
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...

~~~
volida
_Vid comments are of lower information_

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.

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tlrobinson
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...)

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mattmaroon
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?

~~~
wumi
do you not see the irony in defending TipJoy and later ripping on Seesmic?

As Ivan, PG and others said about TipJoy -- it launched relatively recently
and the company is iterating through features.

How does Seesmic not deserve the same patience?

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mattmaroon
I don't read ten blog posts a day about how great TipJoy is. I do about
Seesmic.

I'm not counting Seesmic out, I just don't get the hype.

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wumi
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.

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Monkeyget
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.
<http://www.zefrank.com/ny_06/index.html>

