Mesmo TV: Yet another social video alternative
Mesmo TV is another online video aggregation site, now launching publicly.
Like at many other sites, San Francisco’s Mesmo lets you collect and share videos from other video sites. Its specialty, though, is social video recommendation, to help you find new videos you’ll like. It wants to create a community on the site this way, by matching you up with similar channels and users.
We met the company last month at an event called SF Beta and its founder told us they’re aiming to make a video version of Flixster or iLike, which also use recommendation filters to suggest movie and music, respectively. These engines work as follows: If you’ve tended in the past to enjoy content that your friend, Bob also enjoys, these engines will recommend you other new content that Bob is enjoying. These recommendation filters weren’t present in the first wave of popular video sites like YouTube.
To this end, Mesmo is also offering a Facebook application, although it’s not listed yet as one of 113 Facebook “video” applications at this time. The company is unfunded.
Incidentally, it launched around the same time year as another online video company we covered yesterday, Vodpod. Both say they have around 50,000 registered users now — though it’s unclear how many are active.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.