TwitPic has been one of the big success stories for a service built solely on top of Twitter. It boasts over a million users and gets around 2.5 million unique visitors a month to its site. Celebrities on Twitter are now using it, and it made headlines around the world when a man snapped a picture of the Hudson plane crash and posted it to the service. The Twitter community, it seems, wants a way to share media via the micro-messaging service. And the next logical step in that is video. Enter TwitVid.
TwitVid, which was built by the video start-up Fliggo, doesn’t beat around the bush about what it wants to be — “the TwitPic of video,” co-founder Chrys Bader tells me. That’s interesting because it’s a bit different from a few months ago when a number of startups were aiming for a larger goal: to be the larger “Twitter of video.” But Bader sees no reason to try and build a new community like 12seconds and Seesmic are doing. Instead, TwitVid wants to completely leverage the existing Twitter community.
In fact, Bader and the rest of the Fliggo team see such an opportunity in becoming the TwitPic of video for Twitter that they’ve completely refocused their company to be about this new product. And thanks to their core Fliggo product, which is Y Combinator-backed, the team was able to build TwitVid and get it up and running in just 4 days, according to Bader.
It works exactly as you’d expect. You log-in to the site with your Twitter credentials, and then you can use it as a Twitter client. You choose a video to upload from your computer (web cam support is coming shortly) and enter a Twitter message of 117 characters or less (to make room for the video URL). TwitVid then sends this tweet out to your followers once the video is done uploading and encoding. Upload time varies as you can upload up to a 1 GB or 20 minute video. But encoding for most videos takes about a minute, Bader says. And speed should even improve when the site switches over to Amazon’s EC2 platform.
Bader hopes that many of the celebrities that use TwitPic like Ashton Kutcher, will start using TwitVid as well. Today they already got Playboy to use it, always a good way to spur usage — or at least awareness of your product. As you can see below the Playboy video, all the replies to the initial TwitVid tweet and captured and placed below the video on the TwitVid page.
Currently the site runs Google ads alongside the videos, but Bader tells me that they’re working on an iPhone app to work with the new iPhone 3.0 software. And presumably with the recently more concrete new version of the iPhone that can record video.
It’s worth noting that the company does not have the .com domain name for TwitVid. Instead they use twitvid.io — as in “video,” get it?
Update: Bader has just told me: “Anyone can just email their video from their mobile to u@twitvid.io and we’ll process it for them. Â They have to link an e-mail account, which they can do before or after e-mailing us the video.”
or you could just use a microblogging platform that has integrated video (and pictures). Why leave the site to see media?
cityspeek.com
You are right, the problem is the lack of users…
If a video gets posted in the woods and no one is there to see it was it posted on cityspeek.com?
lol that was really funny (serious)
Wow…just vidoes? Just Pics?
We host Pics, Videos, Blogs, Discussions, Events, Music, Groups and more!
Everything on our site is “Tweetable” with our unique Tweet It! Button.
In the last 5 days members on our site have sent out over 50,000 invites.
What about us “BootStappers. How do we go about getting some recognition?
“Cheers”
JP
Twitvid.io is about as bootstrapped as hardcore as could be. Not sure what you’re talking about when you’re talking about bootstrapping.
I’m not sure being a YC company counts as bootstrapping, they’ve received outside investment after all..
$5000 + $5000 per founder is pretty close to bootstrapping. Bootstrapping forces you to increase cash flows right out of the gate. The incubator (tiny seed capital) round financing method has the same effect…
It’s clear that diffusion has know set into twitter, they better hurry up and monetise.
The product is definitely rushed out. OTH, no search features, no way to embed videos (remember youtube?), no popular tags, really really bad domain name, UI is too similar to twitpic.com. At least have a beta logo
I wouldn’t consider search a vital feature for this type of site. It’s easier to just search for content using search.twitter.com
Embedding seems kind of irrelevant when it’s meant to be a service to share videos over Twitter. The only way they can monetize if people are seeing the site itself.
Domain name is a bit annoying, but once the service is integrated with twitter clients it won’t really matter (@twitvid said an API is coming soon).
No point making the UI different to what people are familiar with (and like). I think it has enough distinction to be seen as its own service though.
it makes sense to piggy back off of twitter if you want to provide a consumer oriented sharing service – simply because that’s where consumers share their thoughts anyways. Not every thought or conversation wants to be shared over video (which is why seesmic seems to be struggling) but if there is a tool / extension that, every so often, allows you to share a video with your existing network and the public – that makes total sense.
Looks a lot better than twitvid.in
I like TweeTube.com except for it’s lack of video uploads & recorder for Windows
If they get a celeb to use it it’ll probably get traction, after Diddy used bubbletweet most of my follows have been using it as well.
We let you post video to twitter using 140b.us
You don’t even need to enter twitter username and password. Since we don’t have the infrastructure to host video we just let the user post embed code from youtube etc.
That’s not as useful though. I don’t want to upload videos to YouTube, I like having twitvid.io as a repository of quick messages I’ve sent out via Twitter.
Wow, a fellow video sharing service ending in dot io! Welcome to the fun!
My service tinyvid.io launched earlier this month… I guess you could say we aim to be the tinypic.com of video:
http://alexa.co...com+tinypic.com
Cheers,
mattpaul
tinyvid.io
Although the video feature offered by Twitvid.io is still limited in many ways, the idea behind it is actually great. It’s much like YouTube for bloggers.
Nice one Chys and Dan
Love the UI! iPhone app and MMS support will get twitvid a lot of traction. Congrats guys!
so the socail network has moved from just posting text, to adding pix and now vidz i like that. Hope it doesn’t get to out of hand. youtube has the right idea keeping the sex out of things..
This is a sight i came up on while looking for different vidz and positive sites.
http://www.mylaylaproject.com
Thanks for finally restoring sane balance of twitter stories.
I look forward to using it.
Disappointed I can’t use this service on my iTouch. Since that’s where I do most of my twittering.
Surprised that wasn’t mentioned.
fliggo guys are smart. sharp too. nice product, but not exactly what I have in mind for their product.
We would love to hear what you have in mind.
Are you with fliggo?
this site rocks http://www.twibeo.com
with added features that may come from outside developers I am sure it will do well in several markets.
The key is twitter will serve mass markets such as the USA well with their celeb culture.
I am not interested in silly celebs garb. But would want to tune into only my friends live feeds , or maybe just my location alone.
Thus fragmentation will kill twitter and fazebook within the next 5 years tops. 5 years in the net world is like 10-15 years in the real world.
http://www.twibeo.com is a twitter-like site that lets you share what you are doing using the combination of text, photos, and yes – even video.
Check it out: http://www.twibeo.com
Umm … you can tweet a video from any YouTube watch page under share options
But this site makes it easier to just quickly post a video-based tweet. Useful if you want to say something with more than 140 characters, or if you need to actually show followers something.
http://tweetube.com works nice for me…
They need to do what metacafe does where it rips from youtube.. I am not uploading vids to two places. takes too long
I don’t think it’s meant to be another channel for videos like YouTube or Metacafe. I’ll be using it to say more than I can in a single tweet.
Are they copying Twitter? Is Twitter a leader in Twits ?
Hmm, what if I don’t have any videos to upload? Can I share video links or embed code?
Only for video uploading at the moment. Why do you need to share video links via a third party service anyways? Easy enough to just to tweet out the link…
We’re releasing webcam recording very soon! You can also submit videos from your mobile phone.
There are some videosites already that is linked with Twitter.
Ex. TweetTube and others..
Thanks for sharing!
I’ve included this app in the Twitdom, Twitter Apps Database. We have in excess of 800 apps listed.
Twitpic is a success and now twidvid will also be successfull
looks like they have big time competition … twitvid.com is coming out soon. it might be the official one.
A YC backed start up that is using HTTP Auth for user authentication? FAIL. Where’s OAuth guys? This is the new standard and is expected by Twitter users.
This is pretty cool. It’ll be interesting and I hope it’s used for true social reasons. My sense is that that direct marketers may start using this and video apps to DM/spam the Twitter community. That would suck because it doesn’t seem like Twitter can handle the volume now — given all the down time and outages on high traffic days. But nice job with this product.
Jose
But exist other service like that ( http://www.gubb.tv ), i think it’s more powerful, twitvid it’s very limited
Not having too good a time with it, as one video I watched was out of sync, and the other was apparently audio only…. And it’s also not clear to me that it will catch on like the other services you mentioned of this type. So, color me in ‘wait and see’ mode….
http://twitvid.com just came out and they have an api. pretty cool!
There is http://www.twitvid.com, with faster upload speed. I don’t think twitvid.io will even take off.
they’re too slow. twitvid.com is already up with videos and webcam capture. With their super fast loading of videos, I see twitvid.com the leader already.
Apparently twitvid.com eventually got the upper hand in its battle with twitvid.io.
Checking the two sites today:
http://twitvid.io now redirects to http://vidly.com/?twitvid and presents a minimal page.
http://twitvid.com presents a feature-filled page, but still doesn’t appear to support OAuth.