Seesmic Review Plus Bonus Seesmic Video

Today we will take a look at one of the newest video startups: Seesmic. Many have called Seesmic the "video twitter". It’s currently in "pre-alpha". The tool has a web cam live upload along with the ability to upload a pre-made video plus link to a video on another video sharing service (so far I see all YouTube shares).  So many video services let you link out, I am not big on that frankly.

So what is Seesmic? It’s a video sharing service just like YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, etc. The difference is that Seesmic has stripped away much of the "extras" that come with the other services. Almost every video sharing service allows for web cam uploads, Seesmic just seems to make it "easier". I have to go easy on this first review as they are in a pre-alpha mode. Right now it’s a very simple video upload, a nice menu of the recently uploaded videos. It looks like all videos become public as I can see everything I believe. Moving around the site is a bit difficult with all of the Ajax and Flash – using the navigation in the browser just results in errors. Update: It seems they are not using Ajax per Vinvin’s note below. Probably some secret French technology!

Seesmic also has a tie into Twitter and YouTube. So when you post a video on Seesmic, it can message out to Twitter and upload the video to YouTube automatically. This is a great way for Seesmic to drive traffic to itself.

Jason Calacanis said on his video with Loic that once Twitter adds video, Seesmic is dead. I would take it a step further and say that when Vimeo and Viddler create a "quick video" function, they too could kill Seesmic. Both of these services have strong, mainstream communities already built and I am quite certain that given the choice, the users would rather remain in the house they are already living in.

And Kyte.tv is already doing a lot of the things that Seesmic appears to be creating. But again, Kyte just seems "massive" compared to Seesmic. If Seesmic can stand true to being as small as possible, it just might work. Overall I am not sold on it given the competition but it does have a lot of promise.

A final note on marketing. Loic LeMeur, Seesmic founder, has done something very smart. He’s gone to many of the popular Valley bloggers (Scoble, Arrington, Calacanis, etc.) and has got them on video which has pushed them to write about the tool. Arrington who got the exclusive on the initial release likes the service so much, he became an investor this month. Loic is charming and his French accent goes over well – similar to the British accents on infomercials. He has done a great job in marketing the tool so far – even though it’s not even in Beta. Let’s see if Seesmic becomes the next Twitter or the next Pownce.

Here is my demo video: