Seesmic Goes Mobile, New Nokia N95 Application Lets You Bring the Conversation Anywhere

The popular video conversation community now extends to the mobile network with the release of a new Seesmic client for the Nokia N95. Both the Seesmic blog and founder Loic Le Meur announced the public application release this past Friday. It had been in development for some time and almost a month ago on his blog Loic asked, Do You Have A Symbian Smartphone Nokia n95 Or The Like?, in an effort to recruit some testers.

Now you can take Seesmic with you and as the Seesmic blog says,

"Seesmic users will be able to record and watch Seesmic videos directly from their cell phones. On top of that, this application stands as the first tool in which users can reply to their friend's videos and build a threaded conversation from their cell phone. Also, true to its social software nature, the Seesmic application allows users to post a Twitter message with a link to their new videos."

Here's the official video announcement and demo:



To install the client on your N95 just go to http://m.seesmic.com from your cell phone, and follow the easy download instructions. For more information go to the Frequently Asked Questions page.

I spent some time today testing the client on the Nokia N95 that I have on load from Nokia/WOM World. I wasn't able to playback any videos due to some player configuration or network issues that I haven't yet resolved. Here's the video thread from my test.

Nokia N95 test
Thank you to Steph and the Nokia/WOM World team for sending me the loaner Nokia N95 so that I could test this new application. Look for more updates from me this next week from Streaming Media West. I'm packing my bags and heading off to San Jose in the morning.

A Wave of Seesmic Events This Week Shakes Up Video Conversations

There was a wave of Seesmic events this week that shook things up in the video conversation space starting with Seesmic's founder Loic Le Meur announcing the ability to play Seesmic videos in Twhirl, their Twitter and Friendfeed client based on Adobe Air. Release notes for version 0.8.2 are on the Thwirl blog. You can play videos and see the thread in this test version and as Loic says, "We are working hard on adding recording asap."

Duncan Riley of the Inquistr says:

"Having downloaded it my initial thoughts: this liberates Seesmic. I’ve never been a huge fan of the until previously dark layout of the Seesmic website, but with Twhirl Seesmic becomes convenient and easily accessible"

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins of Mashable noted that it was only a matter of time for Twhirl to incorporate Seesmic video and had this to say:

"Seesmic continues to be one of the least useful forms of shortform broadcast messaging in the concensus of the general public, but it isn’t for lack of distribution. In recent weeks, Seesmic has grown from being YouTube meets Twitter to a platform for video commenting on blogs, and now with its integration within Twhirl, it’s likely that it’s adoption will increase further."

The next Seesmic event, Seesmic Adds New Threaded Player Feature, seemed to shake things up the most creating a number of aftershocks and debate within the blogosphere. As you may be aware, Seesmic recently created a Wordpress plug-in that enables Wordpress blogs to incorporate video comments along with written comments. A partnership with Disqus, the comment startup that powers over 13,000 blogs, followed soon after making video comments a viral feature on many blogs. Adam Ostrow of Mashable broke the Disqus story and wrote and interesting post on the usefulness of video comments (Disqus Adding Video Comments; Will People Use Them?)

The way Seesmic video comments had worked until this week was that they were displayed sequentially like text-only comments with a date and time stamp. But that changed with their new threaded player with the comments now appearing as they do below as thumbnails along the bottom of the main video comment. Loic Le Meur explains how it works in the video below.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote his review, Seesmic Hijacks Comments With Threaded Replies saying,

"It is a pretty cool feature, but it creates a conflict with all the sites that have embedded Seesmic functionality, such as TechCrunch. We love it when people use Seesmic to comment on posts, and there is certainly something to say for threaded comments. Sometimes you want to respond to comment No. 15, but you are comment No. 74. But if these responses become swallowed within the Seesmic player itself, then it effectively gets taken out of the comment stream of that particular post. (Yes, the responses are still accessible, but people will really have to hunt for them)."

Duncan Riley on the other hand disagreed and posted this response to Erick Shonfeld's post.


Le Meur also replied with a post on his blog: We Are Not Hijacking Anything! You can read more related articles on Techmeme.

Seesmic video comments also got another boost when cocomment CEO Matt Colebourne announced that they will be adding video comments on their web site and blog network.


Finally, news that Seesmic secured a second round of funding co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. Le Meur details his account of how the deal came together on his blog which included an interesting Tweet from investor Pierre Omidyar who also recorded a Seesmic greeting using the new threaded player. UPDATE: FYI, Pierre Omidyar is the founder and chairman of eBay. Here's another post from gadgetforlife.info that tells more on Omidyar and Seesmic.


This brings Seesmic's funding to $12 million US. Le Meur said this about Seesmic's business strategy,

"Monetizing Seesmic won't occur in the next 12 months, we are focusing on the community and the platform. I believe video adsense like advertising will be huge and TV advertising dollars will finally shift online, but it will take 3 to 5 years, this is why we need funding to be there when it grows."

This wraps up my report on the major Seesmic events from this past week. If you haven't tried Sessmic yet, now is the time to join the video conversation.

Seesmic Scores Hollywood A-Listers

By now you may have heard that several famous Hollywood A-listers paid a visit to Seesmic, the popular "Twitter for Video" discussion site founded by web entrepreneur Loic Le Meur. The celebrities included movie directors Steven Speilberg, George Lucas and actors Harrison Ford, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett who joined a discussion on the upcoming release of the new Indiana Jones movie.

Jemima Kiss from the Guardian was one of many who posted several questions to the movie directors and stars and got direct replies from Mr. Speilberg himself. In her post, Spielberg pops up on Seesmic, Kiss said, "It's a simple enough idea but incredibly exciting; I just posted a few direct questions to Spielberg and Karen Allen... and it's quite a buzz watching them reply directly to your own questions. Seesmic is quite intimate too - like most people, I just use my webcam and was still wearing my pyjamas when I recorded."

Kiss asked Speilberg about his plans for the small screen and he replied that he was working on a web project he can't talk about (which Kiss thought it might be a paranormal social network), a games company and a few TV projects.

Kiss said that Picture Production Company put the event together and added that, "Beneath the froth, though, there's a directness and energy about this that really works, though lord knows how much engineering (both technical and bureaucratic) must have gone into this. The best thing about it is that it bypasses the Hollywooid/Cannes schmaltz and gets straight into a conversation."

The web exploded this morning with bloggers reporting on the big news. A publicity event like this will the make popular video discussion site even more popular and mainstream for video conversations as word gets out. Look at Oprah, she's using Skype all the time.

Loic Le Meur has behind the scene details on his blog with photos of their set up and links to all the videos.

He explained that, "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. Some videos were posted in real time, but it was a good surprise and not planned, so no way to tell people to show up. (more...) This experience illustrates how video on the net and Seesmic can be a fantastic way to get our community closer to celebrities and ask them questions directly. They would not have accepted live and the asynchroneous Seesmic format worked very well. They took many more questions from journalists that they would have in face to face as Seesmic passwords were distributed to journalists around the world."

In his VentureBeat post, How to mainstream a web app in a hurry: Get Spielberg, Lucas and Ford aboard, MG Sigler said, "Is it a publicity stunt? Sure. But really how many things aren’t in this day and age? Yes, it might have been more interesting to see Spielberg or Ford in their pajamas answering questions rather than it being a fairly obviously more professional set up (camera on tripod, chair in front of backdrop, off-camera interviewers, etc), but we’ll take what we can get. Remember, Hollywood celebrities also have an image to maintain."

Scoble called it a huge win for Seesmic and pointed to heavy discussion threads FriendFeed. He also added that you can view the individual pages here:

http://seesmic.com/cate
http://seesmic.com/georgelucas
http://seesmic.com/harrison
http://seesmic.com/steven
http://seesmic.com/karen

On a sour note though, the publicity on this was kept secret and the surge of viewers to Seesmic actually created outages at sites like TechCrunch who recently turned on video comments which are powered by Seesmic. Michael Arrington, who is also a Seesmic investor, ripped into Le Meur for not giving investors a "heads up" and has since disabled the video comments plug in as it caused outages on his site by the server reboots.

There were a share of exchanges on Twitter on this subject and Le Meur posted a statement and an apology video that he'll do a better job in the future of communicating with investors, partners and users.

Regardless of the controversy it created through the system outages, this is another example of the power that video conversation can create, and it's by far the most direct form of communication.

A round up from Techmeme as of 4:20 PM PDT:

• MG Siegler / VentureBeat: How to mainstream a web app in a hurry: Get Spielberg, Lucas and Ford aboard
• Mike Bogle / TechTicker: Lucas, Spielberg, Ford and Allen on Seesmic
• Darren Waters / BBC NEWS | dot.life: Spielberg on Seesmic
• Warner Crocker / Life On the Wicked Stage: Speilberg, Harrison Ford, and Karen Allen Do QA on Seesmic
• Robert Scoble / Scobleizer: Celebrity tipping point on Seesmic
• Ewan McIntosh / edu.blogs.com: Steven Spielberg hits Seesmic nearly now video conf.
• Alan Patrick / broadstuff: SHAKING SEESMIC'S FOUNDATIONS
• » All Related Discussion

UPDATE: Added to Loic's quote.

UPDATE 2 (on 5/22/08): Added Seesmic du jour 149: Indiana Jones 4 in Seesmic

It's All About Integration (Seesmic + Twhirl) and (Qik, Flixwagon + YouTube)

Convergence, acquisitions and integration are the synergy that feeds our social networks, entertainment outlets and information feeds. It was big news for Seesmic yesterday as Loic Le Meur announced the acquisition Twhirl, a popular Adode Air Twitter client by German developer Marco Kaiser that lets users connect with text messaging social services like Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku outside of a browser interface.

Loic Le Meur says, "Staying in touch with your friends using microblogging is much easier using a client than through your browser" and offers 20 reasons why this integration will benefit the Seesmic community on his blog and in the video below.




There has been plenty of coverage on the acquisition TechMeme and on Le Meur's blog. and ReadwriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick sums up the benefits an in depth review, Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future, saying that, "Video + Microblogging = Rich User Experience" and that, "How long until even more services are rolled into this new dynamo? Seesmic already integrates outbound publishing with YouTube, Qik and Twitter. How long until the company rolls out lifestreaming capabilities ala FriendFeed, displaying recent user and aggregate-friend activity on any number of other services - then storming the Facebook Newsfeed as a packaged solution to the 3rd party RSS feed dilemma there? Probably not very long... Lifestreaming apps are making this a service, FriendFeed is the leader today, but somehow this functionality is a logical thing to come to Seesmic/Twhirl next."

Doug Caverly from WebProNews says, "There are obviously some potential sticking points - Seesmic is still in alpha, and Twitter itself is notorious for suffering untimely outages. Yet on the whole, the deal looks like it could give quite a boost to microblogging."

Rich media user experiences combined with real-time social interaction drives integration. Whether it's an acquisition or partnership the result is a new and improved tool set for us to communicate.

Live streaming from mobile phones is another red hot area of integration with Qik and Flixwagon announcing their ability to directly upload videos to YouTube a few weeks back.

Robert Scoble reported the Qik news on March 15th and generated some good discussion on quality settings for Qik videos. On the Qik blog Bhaskar Roy said, "Keeping with the mantra of being able to stream video from your cell phone to the world - with this integration, Qikkers can now stream to YouTube, Mogulus, Seesmic, Mobuzz, and all your blogs and websites - automatically just by pressing "Stream" on your cell phone!"

According to a Flixwagon press release, they announced their users will have a new tool,"the FliXee Widget which will stream live mobile-to-web broadcasts directly to Flixwagon users Websites, Blogs, and Social Networking sites. Additionally, Flixwagon users will now have the capability to deliver their mobile-to-web broadcasts directly to YouTube through their Flixwagon account."

Flixwagon media darling and Pop17 producer Sarah Meyers talked with Andy Plesser in this Beet.TV interview about the evolution of live streaming and the new Qik and Flixwagon mobile streaming APIs for YouTube.



It's all about integration.

Seesmic's New Introduction Video Is Cool

Loic Le Meur and his team produced a new video introduction to Seesmic of which he says, "Okay I know, an intro video really sounds like something boring and marketing-ish but we tried to make this one entertaining, especially check out vinvin going all over the screen."

I think they did a great job showing off the features in a fun and informative way. So what are you waiting for? Join the video conversation!