Thank you for this very interesting feedback about Seesmic! It’s so stimulating to know more about what people want, and to integrate their ideas, so the product become closer to them.

This is exactly what we have been trying from the beginning, Loic ‘documenting’ the creation of the company as we go, and making people part of the story, building the platform with them.

This certainly has a two sides effect because we took the choice to open early (as the pre-alpha state ), and correct bugs with our users on the run, trying to consider each feature request, and sometime implementing it asap when the feature sounds like a killer ( like with the vote system ) The downside being that we already have tons of people waiting an invite, and we hate being deceptive by asking them to wait, because we are just not technically ready. But we want to eventually reshape and implement what our first alpha users (testers?) want, before opening the site more widely.

To talk a bit about your writing on metadatas, and organisation of videos, I think you hit a very good point here. Right now it’s kind of ok to organize things like they are because the stream of update is slow. We have been thinking from the beginning about the way we’re going to organize videos since it’s not a content which is easily ‘searchable’, and I think (I hope) we have a good grasp about how to improve this.

My technical point of view on this is that the metadata should be as rich as the client interface, and both are very tighly tied. Having new way to annotate video requires new ways to visually organize them, and we are looking forward to try new things in this area.

You make a good point saying that people dont have the same way to organize their stuff, which is also why we’ll provide Open APIs wherever it’s needed!

Keep the ideas flowing Lloyd! (and post more songs we love them! )

Johann

thanks for all of this – I should have said, I can only think of RSS, but I’m sure there are lots of other ways of skinning this cat.

No matter what, I think that the answer is to provide as many different ways to share, aggregate, comment, mix and match as possible and let the users decide *how* they want to do it. We don’t all have to do it the same way

So threading for example is fine, as long as each item in the thread can also be treated as a stand alone item, recognising that the threaded conversation it started off in is just one way of organising it. So effectively one of it’s tags is is-in-reply-to-X.

There also needs to be some neat way of directing attention or addressing another user – like @ruperthowe in twitter – again, not sure whether it should replicate the twitter syntax/functionality or let that emerge from use (which after all is what twitter did in the first place).

I like the idea of limitation being the norm but rambling being a possibility – we had the whole “5 minutes” conversation over the weekend which was basically the same. 30s feels a lot more ruthless than 5m tho’

seesmic as the love child of twitter and YT is an interesting one, probably a gapingvoid cartoon before long….

So much for brevity. Crikey.

I got my Seesmic invite yesterday. Haven’t had enough time to play with it really, but it needs all the metadata you talk about and more.

A big list or RSS aggregation are not going to cut it.
Twitter and Youtube are both about Surfing and Conversation.

If they want to make it into a truly conversational experience, they’re going to need threads of some kind, and imaginative ways for people to stumble across videos and riff off each other.

They could do worse than rip off a few ideas from Youtube. Youtube’s success has been built on two big things: 1) total disregard for copyright enforcement and 2) the Related Videos panel & the suggestions for what to watch next which pop up after you watch a video, which lead to hours lost surfing YouTube – often spookily accurately referred by tags and words in title & description (YT only allow 6 tags, i think, which focusses the uploader’s mind better than allowing lots). Other smaller things that have helped them have been the video comments feature and the Record-From-Webcam feature which makes it easy to comment.

So after Seesmic make surfing and finding videos easy with good metadata, they can improve the conversational experience by developing good conversation tools. Comments RSS, email notifications are all good, but how about a timeline based comments system, like crowdabout.us or viddler.com?

Twitter’s great success is the brevity and the ability to scan and converse. It doesn’t matter if you miss stuff – you catch what comes by, and chat about it. The people feel feel they need to invest lots of time and stay tuned or they’ll miss out, you lose them.

So I think Seesmic should encourage very short video – the video equivalent of 140 chars. My friend Heath has just started vlogging using his mobile phone at http://mobilevlog.blogspot.com – it has a 30 second limit which means he creates very Twitter-like videos. Perhaps Seesmic should create two tiers of video – one with a 30 second limit, and another for people who feel the need to make something longer. I bet the 30 Second Videos will prove popular. People can tell that something’s going to be short & sweet. And it’ll keep individual entries relatively inconsequential, so the will-this-waste-my-time risk of clicking on something will be hugely reduced AND people won’t feel they’re going to miss out if they don’t watch every video.

Then they could have separate tabs: a 30-second-video Timeline, which would be like video Twitter; as well as a Longer Videos Timeline, and All Videos. Perhaps the icons for 30 second videos could have a green border and Longer videos a blue border, so people knew what they were getting into at a glance.

Then, add the metadata and threading, and let the conversation flow…