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A Seesmic Issue

Mar 17th, 2008
by Lou Paglia.

Get it, Seesmic, Seismic, ah whatever. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Seesmic, there is a great explanation of it here at Cruchbase, here and here. My definition: video-based communication start-up founded by Loic Le Meur which could re-define personal communication to be more video-based and not just predominately email.

Anyway, over the past few days, I’ve been taking a look at Seesmic more closely, and using the new direct messaging capability which I believe was an absolute must (do not have much interest in contributing out in the public timeline like I do with Twitter). I must say that it is great to see Loic’s team innovating right into the customer feedback.

But there are a couple key issues that Seesmic must get out in front of before they turn into seismic ones. Let’s face it, as cool as video emailing is, using it is flying in the face of years of email com. I’m not sure what the active user number is but I would be shocked if it was very high. There are a couple of reasons for it in my opinion:

- Where is the viral network effect for it? The most successful of start-ups have a key viral play as part of their strategy. If Seesmic has one, it is alluding me. I need a way to invite folks in my network into the conversation.

- As everyone jumps from network play to network play, none of my connections are out of Seesmic. I do not know why this is but it is the case. So unless I want to talk to strangers in the public timeline (which is great way to meet others), it has low utility for me personally.

- Tell me when I have a message waiting in my inbox. This is an absolute must-have feature. Someone direct messaged and I do not get notified in my inbox that I have a message waiting ala Facebook and I cannot subscribe to an inbox RSS feed. Big issue.

- Facilitate growth. Let me direct message a non-member and that will facilitate usage, memberships and traffic. If I direct message someone and they are notified, in most cases, they are going to click through and register to see the message. And some of them will stay continue to video message, participate and invite other friends to partake.

Just some thoughts and perhaps some of these are addressed, and I’m missing them. And perhaps Seesmic is trying to control growth to get their infrastructure footing. But until the above is clearly available, I don’t see the high-flyer tool it has the promise to be.

NOTE (10 p.m. EST): Just made online contact with Cathy from Seesmic. She was extremely responsive both on Seesmic and then tried to come here to comment as well. Just made some comment system changes so hopefully she’ll come back and do so. Looking forward to it! Thanks Cathy and great meeting you.

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Viewing 4 Comments

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    Greetings Lou, and thanks for re-enabling comments. (-:

    As I mentioned in my video post - you have hit the nail on the head. To clarify, Seesmic is currently still in closed alpha. This means that to "come play" you need an invite code, which you can either get by signing up on the site or by emailing someone at Seesmic (like cathy[at]seesmic[dot]com, for example ). The reason for this is several fold - mostly to make sure we're handling scaling issues properly and also to ensure that we have built solid technology protections in place for things like copyright, privacy etc...

    Once we kick open the doors to the world what you'll find is that rather than trying to be THE destination site, Seesmic is on track to be A destination site. Our goal - to serve as the engine powering the world's online video conversations.

    So yes, we'll enable you to share your Seesmic content to many other places and allow others - whether registered on Seesmic or not - to participate in those conversations.

    For the more detailed response here's the post: http://seesmic.com/v/2myOkMBQvJ

    Let's keep this conversation going - feel free to email or post Seesmics with other thoughts and ideas ... and of course to all of your readers, feel free to contact me directly if you wish to come test things out for yourself!
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    Cathy Brooks » Thanks again for your response. It is great to "see", "hear" and "read" your response. Eagerly awaiting the day you guys decide to come out of alpha. And I can imagine the scaling issues that you are dealing with if the scaling issues that Twitter has dealt with as of late. They seems to have made the transition to keep up with their traffic levels and I'm sure you/team will be able to as well.

    I look forward to watching your strategy unfold. For some reason, I'm already envisioning the Seesmic API in full integration within Ning. Clearly, YouTubes API release may proove some competition in that space if they are truly trying to head into the API of video space and also being fine with other outfits like Ning privatizing on top of it, perhaps integrating with OpenSocial.

    Thanks again, and I too look forward to continuing the conversation.
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    Great feedback! We're actually working hard right now on the email notification server. Thank you for your help, please send us more feedback.
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    Loic » Thanks. Will do. Good luck with the rest of development.
 

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