Video conversation startup Seesmic raised another $6 million in a series B financing. The round was co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. The series A financing last February, which was also for $6 million, was led by Atomico (the investment vehicle of Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis), and included angel investors Reid Hoffman, Steve Case, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, and Martin Varsavsky. (Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was also an angel investor in the first round).
Seesmic is designed to encourage video conversations among loose social groups (many of whom find each other on Seesmic). Since it launched in a private alpha last October, it’s attracted 21,000 users who post about 2,500 videos a day. Those videos, in turn, are watched about 300,000 times a day. Since last week, Seesmic has opened up its doors to all comers.
The company also owns Twhirl, a desktop Twitter/FriendFeed client that has been downloaded 400,000 times. Founder Loic Le Meur estimates that Twhirl accounts for 12 percent of all Twitter messages, and 5 percent of all FriendFeed comments.
Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay and Seesmic’s new board member, talks about his investment below:
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).
I’m in Erick’s camp. While delighted to receive the occasional YouTube video in my inbox from friends, I largely sit things out when it comes to personal broadcasting services like Twitter and FriendFeed - they simply generate too much noise (and I have too little time to sift through it all).
So perhaps I’m not the best-suited to review the newest version of Twhirl, one of several desktop applications that help you track public conversations and the media shared by your internet buddies.
Twhirl version 0.8.2, released just moments ago, improves the AIR client’s FriendFeed support by adding the ability to comment and “like” items inline, filter by rooms, view avatars, and access links in comments. Pics can also be dragged and dropped onto the client for quick sharing.
On the Twitter side of things (FriendFeed and Twitter are separated into their own windows, unlike with Alert Thingy and MySocial 24×7), Twhirl now allows users to auto-throttle their data requests. This comes in response to Twitter’s regulation of how many times per hour 3rd-party services can retrieve data for a particular user. If Twhirl users enable auto-throttling, the client will automatically generate only 80% of the allowable requests. This prevents users from getting denied updates when they go over the limit (perhaps by manually refreshing a tad too eagerly).
Loic Le Meur, CEO of Twhirl’s parent company Seesmic, says that the newest version also supports XMPP for when Twitter decides to turn that technology back on. XMPP would allow Twhirl to receive updates instantly (kind of like push email) instead of pulling that data periodically.
Le Meur also says that Seesmic integration is coming in the next version, as is consolidation of all three services - Twitter, FriendFeed, and Seesmic - into one panel for a unified user experience. Seesmic’s API, however, means that any of the other desktop clients can add Seesmic support as well. Let the arms race continue.
Disclosure: Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic.
Nik Cubrilovic gives Seesmic a little user interface advice in this interactive video hosted at…Seesmic. Very funny if you use both Seesmic and Twitter. The other 95% of you should just move on the the next post.
Disclosure: I’m a Seesmic investor. And I still think this is funny (Nik seems to imply that Seesmic is a waste of time).
Leave your best video comment below and tell Nik why he’s wrong. or right. or not funny. etc. Best one gets a TechCrunch Tshirt. Bonus points are awarded if you are already wearing a TechCrunch Tshirt in the video.
Celebrities are starting to take notice of Seesmic, a “Twitter for video” service that lets people have asynchronous video conversations on the fly (see my disclosure, I am an investor).
First was Deepak Chopra, who made a whole series of videos for this site. And yesterday things got even more exciting, when Steven Spielberg, Harisson Ford, George Lucas, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett came on the site and had discussions with other users. Here’s one of the exchanges, between Jemima Kiss and Steven Spielberg. Here’s a Harisson Ford video. etc.
So that’s all really great, and I’m happy as an investor. But Seesmic made some terrible judgment calls yesterday around this promotion that has resulted in us removing it from our sites (we installed Seesmic video comments on all TechCrunch Network blogs last month).
First, we didn’t know about the promotion until reading about it this morning along with every one else. All we knew is that our sites all simultaneously went down three times yesterday. After the first time we identified the likely problem as Seesmic and contacted the company. They assured us there was no way the plugin could take the site down. When it happened a second time we disabled the Seesmic plugin and the sites went back up. We identified the problem - the plugin was loading an external Javascript file, and when Seesmic’s servers were down, we just sat and waited for it for up to two minutes before timing out.
Seesmic said they’d patch the problem in the next version (which will pull the Javascript call into the footer instead of the header, so TechCrunch can mostly load even if they are down), and said they shouldn’t be going down again in the meantime. We re-enabled the plugin.
Then we went down a third time late last night, and we disabled the plugin for good (until the new version is available).
This morning we heard from Seesmic that the reason for the downtime yesterday was due to multiple server reboots around the Spielberg promotion.
What They Should Have Done
A simple email to us telling us that they would need to be rebooting their servers periodically over the day would have let us prepare for this and disable the plugin as it was happening. That way, Seesmic video comments would have disappeared from the site for periods of time, but TechCrunch would not have gone down. Of course, as Seesmic grows, having properly architected plugins and server redundancy will also help ensure that this problem doesn’t occur again.
I understand that young startups need a little wiggle room to get things right, and I don’t mind testing that raw software on TechCrunch. Even if that means we go down occasionally during their growing pains.
But never withhold information from your partners and tell them that you have no idea what is causing downtime when you know exactly what the problem is. As exciting as getting Steven Spielberg on your site to talk to your users is, it is not worth being dishonest to partners.
I understand that Seesmic may have been hesitant to tell us about the promotion because they wanted to keep it quiet. But all they had to do was tell us before the downtime that it was going to occur, and we would have been happy. And Seesmic would still be an active plugin on TechCrunch.
Some of you may wonder why I’m calling out a company that I’ve invested in so harshly. The reason: I’m calling them out because they deserve it, and the fact that I invested in them means I need to be careful before giving them any kind of break.
Note: Unless you are a Twitter and/or FriendFeed addict, this post isn’t for you.
Twitter/FriendFeed desktop client Alert Thingy just released version 1.3 of the software.
It is now a fully functioning client for both services (reading and writing). They’ve also added an easy Flickr uploader - just drag a photo into the application and upload it to Flickr.
The thing I like most about the new version of Alert Thingy though is that you access Twitter and FriendFeed in a single window and a single interface (Twhirl, a competitor, requires two windows). That means less desktop space is used. They are also de-duping Twitter messages (since they also appear in FriendFeed), a nice touch.
Switching between Alert Thingy, Twhirl and even the newer browser sidebar with similar functionality is trivially easy - there are no real switching costs. That means all of these products will be in a constant battle over features. That’s great for us users. And since Alert Thingy and Twhirl are more side projects for their parent companies (Alert Thingy is built by Howard/Baines, Twhirl is owned by Seesmic (a company I invested in), there’s little danger of one app driving the other out of business.
Im now planning to switch back to Alert Thingy based on the new features. The current version of Twhirl is freezing periodically as well, requiring regular restarts.
We’ve been testing a new comments feature on the TechCrunch blogs over the last few days - video comments, powered by Seesmic (a company I invested in). The feature is delivered via a Wordpress plugin (details here and an overview video is here).
You’ll see the link to leave a video comment at the end of the comment stream on every post. You can choose to leave a text comment or a video comment. You’ll need to create a Seesmic account to start leaving comments, and that account will allow you full access to Seesmic as well as any other blogs that begin to use the plugin.
The plugin also integrates directly into the Wordpress admin page, allowing bloggers to create a video and embed it into their post directly.
Seesmic is not the first video startup to do this. Viddler released an excellent plugin earlier this year as well. Details on the Viddler product are here, which includes a list of blogs that have integrated it. If you are thinking of adding this feature to your blog, you should look at both products and choose the one that’s right for you.
A lot of people are addicted to Twitter (microblogging), and a lot of people are addicted to FriendFeed (friends’ activity streams).
While both are web services, each offers an API that lets third parties build on top of them, including desktop applications. Twhirl, recently acquired by Seesmic, has emerged as the leading desktop client for Twitter, and Alert Thingy launched days ago on the newly released FriendFeed API. Both are built on the Adobe AIR platform.
Yesterday, though, the two desktop clients started to compete with each other directly when Alert Thingy added support for Twitter as well. And even though I am an investor in Twhirl, I said I may uninstall it for good once a few more features were added to Alert Thingy. There is no reason to have both installed once they overlap completely.
Today, though, Twhirl hit back by adding FriendFeed support, including the ability to search, lookup users, write comments and bookmark items. The new version, 0.7.9, is available now here and will be pushed generally to users in a few days.
Loic Le Meur (founder of Twhirl parent company Seesmic) created the video below demonstrating the new version:
Due to the conflict I won’t editorialize further on Twhirl. Users who want a desktop application for both Twitter and FriendFeed should test both applications out for themselves to decide which one is best for them. The good news for all of us: competition, even in this very niche market, is forcing rapid innovation.
San Francisco video/chat startup Seesmic has acquired Twhirl, a popular application created by German developer Marco Kaiser that allows users to access the Twitter service directly from their desktop, and also cross post to other services like Pownce and Jaiku. The acquisition price is not being disclosed.
Twhirl is considered among the better third party Twitter applications. ReadWriteWeb, for example, just yesterday identified it as the third most used method for posting to the Twittersphere, behind the web and instant messaging, and just in front of Twitterific. It has been downloaded 100,000 or so times.
Seesmic says they will continue development of the application and eventually integrate their own service into Twhirl, making it the official Seemsic desktop client.
It’s important to note that Michael Arrington is a minor investor in Seesmic and so we won’t add a lot of commentary on the transaction. Look for a company announcement soon.
Update: Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur announces his reasons for the acquisition on his blog, along with the following video:
My friend Loic Le Meur wants to convince startups to avoid the lure of focusing only on local markets. He asked to write the guest post below, which I think is worthy of debate.
Video conversation startup Seesmic raised another $6 million in a series B financing. The round was co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. The series A financing last February, which was also for $6 million, was led by Atomico (the investment vehicle of Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis), and included angel investors Reid Hoffman, Steve Case, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, and Martin Varsavsky. (Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was also an angel investor in the first round).
Note: Unless you are a Twitter and/or FriendFeed addict, this post isn’t for you.
