Seesmic Goes Hollywood
Just last week we wondered if video messaging services Seesmic will take over the world. Looks like we won't have to wait for our answer any longer. A service that was once just just a blip on the radar made a rather huge leap today, a leap that could catapult the service past Twitter. Earlier today, the Hollywood crew members starring in the new film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull took the time for a cool Q&A on Seesmic!
Q&A On Seesmic
Live for the Q&A, the Guardian's Jemima Kiss had some questions for at the all-star cast that consisted of Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, George Lucas, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett. Some of her thoughts on the ordeal are:
It's a simple enough idea but incredibly exciting; I just posted a few direct questions to Spielberg and Karen Allen (Marian was always one of my favourite heroines) and it's quite a buzz watching them reply directly to your own questions.
Simple enough indeed, and the videos are generating massive headlines for Seesmic. Though all of the videos werent posted in realtime, Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur notes on his blog:
I wish we would have given some notice to our community but we did not know obviously until the last minute if it would happen or not and the production team had requested the videos being posted in private first, then unlocked, which would not have allowed us enough interactivity.
Star Studded Seesmic Pages
Here are the links for the Seesmic pages of the stars and we've also provided a few of the Q&A videos at the bottom of the post.
Will Seesmic Take Off?
There will definitely be benefits from the stars showing up on Seesmic. In fact, the service is already experiencing an influx of replies and user activity. However, we wonder if that's just due to the appearance of the celebs and how long activity lasts. Whether or not this publicity stunt will catapult Seesmic into the web stardom is the $200,000 question on everyone's mind. We have our guesses, but first we'd like to hear your thoughts in the comments section!
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Pretty cool wouldn't you say?
India Jones is a pretty big splash and anything that helps push Twitter into the background has my vote.
Live From Las Vegas
The Masked Millionaire
Seesmic comments in blogs has terrible pixelation - they need to work on quality before that side of things improves.
These celeb things generate some buzz and some credibility, but unless the company executes and capitalizes on it, it's just flash in the pan stuff.
Seesmic will change the perception of video conversations over the web.
The new concept seesmic brings to the table is reallty interesting and from my pov it is the best conversation method so far on the web.
Loic and the seesmic crew are doing a great job and keeping a worm relationship with their users which contributes a lot to the product as well as the brand itself.
Tags: interface, browsing, sorting comments, commentag, question
The problem is that videos are not browsable.
How do I know which video to play? Ok it is obvious for Harrison Ford because everybody knows his face. But what about replies? What about videos added by the long tail?
People just don't know which video to play. And they get very disappointed when they found out after 30s that the video comment they are watching does not interest them.
The Commentag plugin for Wordpress is a good mitigation as it helps sorting comments and videos comments on a blog (example here: http://tinyurl.com/4vgqkf). Maybe a similar solution should be implemented on seesmic.com. It will make clicking the play button less risky.
Overall, like many things in web2.0, it is all about the interface (btw brillant article on the contextual interfaces).
Seesmic is all about one person behind a camera explaining one thought.
This is all new and a new interface with a new way of discovering and browsing through content -or thoughts- should be invented to sustain such new concept.
My feeling is that this has to go through tags with a bottom-up approach. But one may argue that people don't want to add tags? What do you think?
I have my webcam set up and ready to roll, but I have never been inclined to record instead of just typing yet.
This list:
* Steve Spielberg
* George Lucas
* Harrison Ford
* Shia LeBoeuf
* Cate Blanchett
will do nothing to change that I don't think video lends itself well to the application. Good luck to them, but it would be a pretty sad life taking your cues on what to do from Hollywood.