VentureBeat

Twitter became famous by posing the question, “What are you doing?” Gawkk, a short-form video sharing site, mimics that meme with a similar query: “What are you watching?”

Although the New York-based site gave the world a peek back in December, the company has announced a site revamp and relaunch as part of this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Since Gawkk is a video sharing site (and not a hosting hub like YouTube), it automatically scours thousands of outlets across the web for embeddable video. Gawkk then separates this content into a number of categories and individual channels using basic themes like business, commercials, and music. Users are free to subscribe to these channels, or use Gawkk’s basic search tools to look for additional video content.

Along with Gawkk’s video search functions comes a slew of social features. If a video catches a user’s eye then they can post it to their activity stream and then attach comments. Once a user has either posted or commented on a video, they can invite friends to join in the conversation on Gawkk, or cross-post their activity to Twitter.

And, much like the microblogging site it admires, Gawkk lets users follow one another so that they can track each others’ updates in a centralized feed. In short, the ultimate goal remains the same — the more users promote utility by discovering and discussing interesting content, the more likely they are to build a following and have the favor returned.

Still, it seems unlikely that Gawkk will steal a lot of Twitter’s thunder.  As it stands, Twitter users are already comfortable linking to and discussing their favorite videos. Also, since a lot of Gawkk’s individual elements can be found elsewhere (YouTube comments, Facebook news feed, etc.), the site will really have to leverage the strength of its users’ conversations to stand out.

Sites like YouTube and Digg have done well by relying on the activity of their users, but time has shown that that’s not always the safest bet.

Next Story: Flash presentation maker Flypaper gets a simple web editor
Previous Story: After a funding failure, hi5 “kind of died” today