If content was king in old media, conversation is king on the Web. That is why everybody wants to control the conversation. Video commenting startup Seesmic is no exception. People can post short videos on Seesmic that other people can follow, just like on Twitter. Some blogs and Websites also make it possible for Seesmic members to comment on posts via video instead of text, as we have done here at TechCrunch. (Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic).
But today Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur rolled out a new feature that completely hijacks the conversation: threaded comments. Now, anyone with a Seesmic account can respond to a Seesmic video by hitting a reply button with in the embeddable Seesmic player, and all the responses can be seen as video thumbnails if you mouse over the bottom of the player’s screen. In other words, the responses go wherever the video goes. Here is Le Meur trying to explain the feature (but being French, he has trouble pronouncing “thread”—don’t hold that against him):
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).
Of course, comments have already left the building, so to speak. Many of the most interesting comments about a blog post may occur on Twitter or FriendFeed or some other service. Now Seesmic joins that trend. For what it is worth, Le Meur says that he will soon add the ability to attach related link to each video. But if all of these services—Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, etc,—really want to play nice, they would figure out a way to automatically seed comments back into the original post that is being talked about. Who wants to create that set of APIs?
Leave your reply in comments (to this post, please).
dude pushing flash and wordpress to the limit
smart guy
Doesn’t TC have a disclosure policy? At least let readers know that MA has an investment in Seesmic.
@FNI, first paragraph in bold:
(Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic).
One innovation after another. Good stuff. And spot on comments regarding cross linking and comments getting buried.
Now we’re looking forward to the mobile client!
I was over at Seesmic yesterday shooting interviews for a film and Loic and the staff were very accommodating & generous with their time. Nice people.
Well in reality this is twitter for video adopts viddler self-contained commenting//response system. Since everyone in the tech scene loves a good mashup comparison that’s what I see. Personally I’m not a fan of such systems as it buries the comments and locks them into a player construct. For some this is great and they love the self-contained widget like aspect, but to me in practicality it didn’t pan out. At least not in the implementations currently in use.
Being able to quickly scroll and scan a thread for something of interest is key. Another problem with video comments is that extracting the quickly perused bits of information from the video in a text manner is still an evolving technology that’s impressive, but not quite there yet. For people with patience the video responses are a great element to a site and we used to push that as a standout feature of Viddyou over a year ago. But even still we crossed the path of having all the responses appear in the self-contained player and decided that was just too much crap to shove into a playback system.
Head in the right place but it’s a flawed idea for the above reasons and more.
No offense, but it almost looks like a man off the European street shoved into an IT CEO job. Definitely not Chad Hurley.
The feature itself is ok. It’s not a very hard feature, the player is probably just hitting a xml list for the thumbnail urls to the replies. YouTube’s already does that for similar videos.
OK, I guess.
Player us awfully 1.0 too busy…
Now when they make it sleek and decide to allow anonymous video replies… I’ll look twice at it.
Does anyone watch video comments? I never do because you can’t scan them in a fraction of a second like text. There’s enough content out there that you have to plow through it as fast as possible and video just slows that down without adding any value to the discourse.
There’s one simple solution: implement threaded comments on TC, using a plugin (there are plenty to choose from). It seems that’s a bit overdue anyway.
Rupert Goldie:
No, no one watches video comments other than as a curiosity.
Loic, when you provide numbers that show specific use, and read adoption, I’ll believe it.
ya
smart guy
Isn’t there already a set of API’s for that? Doesn’t the Atom Comments Extension do stuff like what you’re talking about, with pushing comments back to the blog?
Seesmic will never be adopted by the demographic it’s directed at because that demographic is usually sitting in front of their computers in their bathrobe or their underwear.
@13:
Not here in Australia - too hot for bathrobes…
I wish Loic the best of luck…
For those who want to jog through this post and the comments (with links) and then land back automatically on this post, jog this:
http://www.jogtheweb.com/reade.....rackId=132
It’s very early days but there is some work to create a solution called CommentBack using XML-RPC. See http://groups.google.com/group/commentback/ and http://www.commentback.org/. Whatever happens, it would be great if there was some buy in from people like FriendFeed and Disqus to find a general solution.
@12: My understanding is that the Atom Comments Extension adds reply-to information to your own feed, it doesn’t send any notification back to what you’re commenting on.
@17 But as long as a feed had Reply-to information, couldn’t FriendFeed (or Disqus or anybody) find that information and use it to push comments back to the original post?
I’m no Atom expert, and this *does* seem a little too easy. What am I missing?
@18: If someone comments on FriendFeed, with the Atom Comments Extension FriendFeed could indicate in a feed that it was a reply to a particular blog post. It’s the push comments back to the original post bit that’s missing. There is currently no API to do it. (I’m no expert either
This is all just past the scope of my understanding (quite frustrating), but in most Atom feeds, in each post there is a link like
Isn’t this used to let feed readers know where to push comments?
There is an equivalent in RSS. wfw:comments, maybe?
At the very least, FriendFeed could try to figure out what blogging platform the blog is hosted on and use that platforms APIs (we’ve all got ‘em) to push the comments back.
There has to be *some* way, fav.or.it does it, right?
Sorry, it toasted my example link…
>link rel=”replies” type=”text/html” href=”http://example.com/comment.php?postID=350″ title=”20 Comments” />
There is no rel=”replies” in the Atom specification, so if it’s in a lot of feeds it’s not standard. And yes, FriendFeed could just work out for every blogging platform how to get comments sent back, but that’s not scalable. If it’s going to work there needs to be a standard way, then the blogging (or whatever else) tools can implement the standard.
Agreed, there *should* be a stranded.
Now what?
As I said in @16, CommentBack has just started work on that. So far there’s been involvement from at least WordPress and Habari on the blogging platform side, and ZicZac (an Italian social network) on the social network side. I know that Daniel Ha from Disqus has at least said he’ll look into it.
No one ever uses these video comments. I see one video comment here on TC every 30 stories or so…. and those are by either Scoble or that Feldman dude… and I don’t wanna see either of their mugs.
I don’t like the idea of video comments. I prefer to read a text. I don’t need to see everybody’s face.
Plus, it makes the coversation too “dispersive”.
Listened to Loic’s post above
Thought he was trying to say something that sounded to me more akin to Phreadz rather than Threads
Which is why fav.or.it pushes comments back to source - we have threaded comments but it does not impact on the site. blogger has started also accepting threaded data and I am sure more will follow.
sent from: fav.or.it [FID215720]
He’s the king!
Is it mandatory that people leaving video comments bug their eyes out emulating the squirrelly raccoon/mouse/owl seesmic icon? Or can us regular folk not wired up on 5 macchiato’s partake
in the inane insipid idiocy of video comments? I’m delighted to see that all threads are now integrated into one instance of the app rather than individual posts throughout the textual comments section… That way I can skip it all together.
so you tell us our comments suck, but then ask us to leave a comment….
Not sure I really get the video commenting thing.
But I think your comment/suggestion at the end, regarding APIs to have comment streams link back to the originating post, is spot on. (As I posted at http://vcmike.wordpress.com/20.....-comments/)
I have a suggestion: get the good folks at Wordpress to work with the other services to build/evangelize these APIs?
@VCMike, we are already doing it, we bring all those identities together and are able to receive and send comments between them.
We only just launched, but lookout within a week for further announcements about the API
sent from: fav.or.it [FID216635]
I don’t get it. How will seesmic eventually make money if they allow other websites to implement video conversation? Bloggers get the money from their own ads and sponsored links… and seesmic pays for the bandwidth?
They own the videos, i guess, but what is the value of video comments after few days?
Can someone explain?
c’mon Techcrunch and Eric. Have you counted the number of osts about Seesmic over the last couple of months? Loic is doing a great job, but you are over doing it. There are many good stories and startups out there .. but you seem to take a few (in this case where you have invested, and where the CEO is your friend) to push it on the Techcrunch Audience. You have large audience and credibility … be carefull how you use it
Anytime you need to join a third-party (Seesmic) before being able to post a comment puts you at risk. This is a good example of this and why I would never use Seesmic on my site.
Video comments would be much friendlier if I didn’t have to sign up first. You should be able to simply record your video comment and move on.
Seesmic gets all the rewards (registrations), while leaving publishers out in the cold as they maintain control of the end-user.
Again, a perfect example of how Seesmic builds up their user base and then literally steal customers that came through your site as their own.
Really dirty pool and people should take it for what it is — Theft of your users.
7: “Now when they make it sleek and decide to allow anonymous video replies… I’ll look twice at it.”
Anonymous video? Huh?
Just wear a balaclava and hold wadded-up tissue paper in your cheeks to disguise your voice. (The tissue-paper trick is what spies do when making anonymous calls, as I’m reliably informed by The Secret Agent’s Handbook that I got for my 8th birthday.)
It’s ironic that he keeps saying phreadz (http://phreadz.com/) which is one of his bigger competitors.
I still don’t get Seesmic. I have yet to watch a single video comment. If you have something you want to say, type it or it’s going to be ignored by the majority of a blogs readers.
Well I think it’s pretty cool…
Balmer said “Developers, Developers, Developers”
Loic needs to say “How to Monetize, How to Monetize, How to Monetize”
Arrington needs to say “If its so cool, How come no-one in this post uses it”]
I’ll say “Business Model, Business Model, Business Model” and “Not-Sustainable, Not Sustainable, Not-Sustainable”
(Btw its pretty cool feature)
Amazing, not one Seesmic comment in this thread just yet. Of course now that I’ve said it, someone will post one.
Definitely, I agree about leaving comments back to the original post would be a good idea. I had the same request for the YokWay service.
Ping/track back might be a good temporary solution before a specific api emerges.
This could be done as a “win/win” scenario (for both the blog content producers and syndicators)
I’ll create that set of APIs! Just throw a million dollars my way. Seriously though, I was doing a little work with the Seesmic API but got sidetracked into doing FLV file downloaders. Following comments is an interesting problem area that may create opportunities for somebody who can create the right solution. I tried to solve a problem finding comment replies left on YouTube videos but now they include the text of the comment in the email notification so it is not so much of a problem.
@Andy/41 I think that Seesmic, as many other companies, follows the community first, monetization later, business strategy. Youtube had the same business model (and still has in some respect).
Anyway, I am sure Seesmic has some sort of “official” business models. One very clear to me is the “build to flip” one, which might represents a substantial return on investment for the founders and investors.
My only tech-investment question is about Seesmic future operational cost as it relates to software licensing. If you read the Flash API specification, these capabilities (client video encoding and up-streaming APIs) requires Adobe Flash Media server. I assume Seesmic is using the open source reversed engineered Red5 product, which is fine while they are small. However, Adobe might take a second look if they become more significant (especially if they get acquired)
In other word, if Google would happen to buy Seesmic, Google might inherit a huge software compliance cost?
Anyway, Seesmic is doing great stuff, I love the in-context reply feature. For the first time, I wanted to interact with Seesmic. Seesmic is winning me over (as a user).
Great Job Loic!
Waoo ! Loïque Jemeur has an interesting idea, for once.
nothing new… we did that feature half year ago! in 2007 … seems like they`re copying us
… the same with the WP widget !…
check it here on the startpage: http://www.commentt.com
cheers
Arrington,
Apart from stopping eating freedom fries, you got to add an OpenID login form to Techcrunch. This might be useful for distributed comments.
The usability needs work. How is the viewer supposed to return to the original video of Loic? Or watch the most relevant/interesting/popular responses to the video without wasting time watching all 120+ responses of the hyenas who’ve taken it upon themselves to reply? I bet at least one of them says “look Mom, I’m on TechCrunch,” but I don’t have time to sift through them.
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