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Seesmic Relaunches Website; Video Service Pushed to the Bottom
Yesterday I noticed that social activity community streaming tool Seemic had relaunched their frontend website. Normally I wouldn’t write about a simple design change but the change goes deeper than just design. It appears that the original Seesmic video service has been pushed out to a subdomain (video.seesmic.com) and now only appears as a small item on the foot of the new Seesmic home page.
Earlier this year I wondered why Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur wasn’t using his own service in favor of other video tools including Ustream and YouTube. Could this shift to social stream app have been the real reason? I’ve noticed over the past month, less and less people posting videos.
Some heavy Seesmic video users have commented on Twitter about the change as well:
- iKrissi – If Seesmic is slowly pushing aside and giving up it’s ‘video conversation’ roots, can you let us know sooner than later? We miss it.
- Tellus (this is Frieda, the person with the most videos on Seesmic) – I’m very disappointed in the fact that you didn’t us or at least me a clue. That not what a friend would have done!
I’d like to see Loic address the state of the video service – while I don’t use it, I know others do. In fact, there’s a video thread going about the status. Loic has typically been upfront about his application and updates/changes. It’s important with a community tool/service that the members are kept up-to-date on the current situation.
Update 1: Loic has a video post about the changes – he notes that there has been no growth and he is focusing on the Seesmic desktop application. Here’s his video – it’s worth watching as Loic speaks openly and honestly. He says no video site is growing except for YouTube (notes 12 seconds in the same bucket as Seesmic).
Update 2: You can’t even get to the links via the video player anymore as the domain name has changed – I guess they need to update the urls in the video player to point to video.seesmic.com.
Here’s the old Seesmic homepage:
Here’s the new Seesmic homepage (the video function is actually further down than this screenshot goes):
our video site is still fully available at video.seesmic.com what our users expected is that I announced it before making that change but we talked since then I don’t think it’s such a big deal since the site is here. I am investigating now the link issues you report, thanks for that.
Video will be a first class citizen in our future seesmic.com site we are working very hard on.
thanks for the reply loic
Well im glad that Loic is looking at his business and saying “hey, this isn’t working.. but this is, lets go for it.” Something that I think a lot of start-ups don’t get at times.
I think striking what’s hot (apps and iPhone) is the smart thing to do but it looks like he ignoring his local European market. Why isn’t there a Nokia/s60 version of Seesmic desktop yet?
Anthony, “Why isn’t there a Nokia/s60 version of Seesmic desktop yet?” because Symbian is a pain to develop on sorry to say, and we have limited resources, so we focus on the fastest growing browsing device, the iphone.
Thanx for responding :)
[...] its social aggregation tool, Seesmic Desktop, and associated products. CenterNetworks had the news this morning after noticing that video was pushed way down to the bottom of Seesmic’s site in [...]
[...] you CenterNetworks (love your site Allen) and VentureBeat (great meeting you Matt) for pointing this video out to [...]
You should note that Loic spoke TOTALLY out of turn in regards to 12Seconds as noted in the 12Seconds blog: http://blog.12seconds.tv/post/130863638/seesmic-12seconds-and-social-video
“In light of Loic’s video, I wanted to point out two things:
1. The point of Seesmic (the video site) was not to allow people to share video on Twitter and Facebook. It was to have “video conversation.” It turns out the conversation is on Twitter. Video is a component of that conversation – so are other media types. We compete with Seesmic about as much as we compete with Hulu.
2. Our growth is not flat. We launched a year ago and we’ve had great growth. People like using 12seconds and we’re going to keep building our community. We’re pretty content. Social video isn’t easy but it’s worth it.”
[...] CenterNetworks [...]
[...] to crack. That apparently was hurting Seesmic’s video conversation efforts. As Allen Stern first noted, Seesmic is now de-emphasizing the video platfrom, putting its resources into its growing desktop [...]