video commenting Archive

Blog commenting replacement system Disqus is announcing a partnership today with Seesmic today. Not sure exactly what to call Seesmic these days – it’s partially a video message board and partially a video blog commenting system. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Adam Ostrow first reported on Disqus adding video comments last week.

This deal helps Seesmic more than Disqus. Both companies are currently valley darlings but Disqus seems to have started the slow crawl to mainstream adoption. Seesmic is still in the "figuring out who I am" stage — which is ok for a new company like Seesmic is. I would have held off on this partnership a few months until Seesmic gains a bit more traction and user adoption. Also, video blog commenting seems about 18 months ahead of its time.

Disqus currently self-reports 13,000 sites actively using their blog comment replacement and Seesmic reports over 300 sites using the video commenting plugin. Check out my commentary on Disqus where I do a deep dive into the pros and cons of using their blog commenting replacement service.

What’s interesting is that Seesmic investor Techcrunch launched the video commenting system a couple of weeks ago and so far it’s been barely used. And when users have posted videos, most nearly all of them have me wanting my time back. A video comment must have emotion and offer something text can’t. Otherwise just post the text and let me read and/or scan and move on. Just because you have a webcam, doesn’t mean you should create video comments instead of text comments.

Here’s an (extreme) example of a comment that just wasted 30 seconds of my time (this is from the "Wired" post on TC this morning):