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12seconds has a goal: It wants to be the go-to platform for video status updates. In order to make a good platform, you need a good application programming interface (API). Today, 12seconds is launching that API and announcing its first three partners.

TweetDeck, an Adobe Air client for services including Twitter, Blippr, a site that does short-form reviews, and Phreadz, a startup that does threaded video conversations, are the first three partners to use the 12seconds API. But the company is eager for more partners and is encouraging anyone to play around with the code.

I Hate Mom. on 12seconds.tv

Despite 12seconds’ lofty goals, it’s still easiest to describe it as a video version of the micro-messaging site Twitter. Many think of the video conversation site Seesmic as that, but on Seesmic videos can be fairly lengthy. On 12seconds, just as on Twitter, there are very short limits for how much you can say on video and in text respectively. In my opinion, this 12 second limit leads to some interesting, yet disposable videos.

12seconds has been having some fun with this limit as well. It recently launched the 12second challenge, where everyday a question or task is posed and users respond in a video. Today’s challenge, for example, asks users to sing their favorite songs when they were 13 years old. All of the response are then compiled on a single page.

It’s lightweight fun, but that’s what 12second is all about right now. Whether this API can transform it into a platform remains to be seen.

Find the API here.

Below: What 12seconds will look like integrated into TweetDeck.

When online video messaging service Seesmic first emerged last year it was dubbed by many (including us) as the “Twitter of video.” It’s an easy comparison to make, both are micro-messaging services of sorts. However it’s obvious that Seesmic is much more time-consuming than Twitter. Seesmic videos can be several minutes long. That’s an eternity in a Twitter world limited to 140 characters or less. A new video messaging service called 12seconds aims to fix that “problem.”

As you might imagine, videos posted to 12seconds are limited to 12 seconds in length. Why 12 seconds? “Because anything longer is boring,” reads the service’s about page.

It goes on:

The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.

The site is a side project by Yahoo employee David Beach, according to NewTeeVee, which stumbled upon the site earlier today.

If you hate Twitter — and I know there are quite a few of you out there — then you’re really going to hate 12seconds. I cannot wait for people to start using it just to watch them get abruptly cut off when they don’t realize just how short 12 seconds actually is.

The site has a clean, easy-to-read UI as compared to Seesmic which is rather cluttered. It’s also almost entirely white compared to Seesmic, which is almost entirely black. I smell a rivalry a-brewin’.

The Santa Cruz, Calif.-based 12seconds is currently in private Alpha testing mode.

Here’s someone showing off their $700 shoes. In 12 seconds!

Mobile/E-Mail Video on 12seconds.tv

update: Fellow writer Dean Takahashi saw this product’s 12 second limitation and immediately thought it was simply to save on high costs of serving video over the Internet. An interesting take, I think.

Updated

Seesmic, a startup that lets users post short video comments and snippets, has raised $6 million in a second round of funding. The new round was led by Omidyar Network, the firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Wellington Partners.

The San Francisco company has been dubbed the “Twitter of video” — through its platform, users can easily record and post short video segments to their blogs, social networks or to the Seesmic site itself. You can also post video comments on blogs (like VentureBeat) whose discussions are powered by Disqus.

We’ve been a bit skeptical about whether this will take off, because it’s not clear that videos are as effective and easy a way to communicate quick thoughts as, say, a one-line text comment on a blog or a short post on Twitter. In comment threads, if people aren’t willing to take the time to watch your video, a commenter can become cut out of the conversation. I haven’t seen a lot of use in VentureBeat’s comments either, although that may be because we haven’t done much to promote it.

Seesmic says the platform provides video to 1,500 sites and blogs.

The company also just released a promising new feature — an embeddable video that can include threaded comments. That means an entire conversational thread can be viewed by playing a single video. This idea has some problems too, because sites may not want to see too many user comments disappearing into one video. But at least Seesmic is trying out different ways to make the commenting process more organic.

The new round brings Seesmic’s total funding to $12 million.

Update: Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur offers his account of how the deal fell into place here. I love the fact that after Seesmic’s first round, Omidyar wrote a comment on Twitter asking, “How come I didn’t get to invest?”

Update 2: To help counter some of our skepticism, Seesmic has sent along some other numbers to show their traction: The site gets 120,000 unique visitors per month, 69,000 video posts per month and around 3,600 new users.

I still believe Twitter is on the slow road to mainstream adoption, but today another micro-messaging service, Seesmic, took what should be a big leap in that direction. The service, which uses video rather than text to convey messages, has had perhaps even more questions than Twitter about its usefulness. Perhaps not anymore.

This morning The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss posted some questions aimed at the cast and crew of the new film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Guess who responded? Director Steven Spielberg, Producer George Lucas and star Harrison Ford among others. Yes, they’re all there, on video, on Seesmic.

Is it a publicity stunt? Sure. But really how many things aren’t in this day and age? Yes, it might have been more interesting to see Spielberg or Ford in their pajamas answering questions rather than it being a fairly obviously more professional set up (camera on tripod, chair in front of backdrop, off-camera interviewers, etc), but we’ll take what we can get. Remember, Hollywood celebrities also have an image to maintain.

Seesmic’s founder Loic Le Meur claims that he didn’t even know it was going to happen until right before the videos went up, so he couldn’t even massively publicize it. You can bet he’s getting that publicity now. The BBC and others are already writing it up; and certainly a lot more will.

Something like this simply could not work in the same way on Twitter (which currently has no video option). Even if Spielberg, Lucas, Ford and the others were on the service, it would be very hard to tell if it was actually them behind their names, and maybe even harder to tell if they, and not their assistants, were answering questions. With Seesmic we have the iconic figures right in front of us on video.

Read the rest of this entry »

Updated

There’s another company jumping on the video comments bandwagon. Disqus, the startup whose system powers comments for more than 13,000 blogs (including VentureBeat), is adding video through a partnership with Seesmic.

You can see the system at work on Fred Wilson’s blog. There aren’t any particularly fancy or groundbreaking features yet — Disqus’ Daniel Ha (no relation to the writer of this post) says the company wanted to keep things fairly straightforward so it would be “as seamless as possible to go from text to video” and not scare users away.

Fair enough, but do people actually want to leave video comments? TechCrunch has had video comments for a while, but they don’t seem to get much use. Wilson’s firm Union Square Ventures is an investor in Disqus, yet his post — which begins, “First, let me say I am not sure about the utility of video comments” — doesn’t sound completely sold on the idea either.

Ha, however, says that video commenting can take off if it’s marketed to people in the right way, which hasn’t happened yet. This announcement sounds like a small step in a bigger push toward more adoption.

“This new release is admittedly for the early adopter crowd,” Ha says. “We want to get a feel for how they would be using this and their willingness to let go of old standards.”

I’m not convinced yet — it seems like simple text-based comments are just so much easier and more effective. But then, I’m an old-fashioned text guy myself. We’ll keep watching; maybe people will start using the video system for interesting ends.

The new service, which Mashable broke last week, could at least lead to a higher profile for relatively unproven video company Seesmic.

Update: And now you’ll get to see the new feature in action on VentureBeat — we’ve enabled video comments. Have at it!

Seesmic, the messaging service that’s often called the Twitter of video, has reinforced that comparison by acquiring the Twitter application Twhirl, which lets people read and post to Twitter directly from their desktop.

Twhirl, which is made with Adobe AIR, has the look and feel of an instant messaging client, and Seesmic will use that characteristic to its advantage, making it easier for people to shoot video comments and replies back and forth to each other.

The company didn’t disclose the acquisition price, but it certainly wasn’t much. Twhirl, although it has been downloaded some 100,000 times, is an unfunded one-man startup begun as a hobby, and Seesmic has only taken $6 million and is similarly cash-flow free. The founder of Twhirl, Marco Kaiser, is joining Seesmic to work on the application full-time.

Seesmic itself has yet to be proven; some users love the ability to post short, video-form updates and comments, while others hate what they see as the banality of droning on to a webcam. (see the comments on our last story). But what’s really interesting about this acquisition is that it’s both combining two different communication services, and moving them back out of the web browser.

It has almost become gospel that new applications need to be web-based, but a website just doesn’t seem to cut it, for quite a few services — Twitter and Seesmic included.

“Everything we have is decentralized, but it’s good to have it all back in one place, which FriendFeed is also doing. It’s the way to go,” Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur told me. He says that Seesmic is busy building itself out into different services, including an embeddable widget, a Facebook application, and FriendFeed integration, which was just added today. “Seesmic.com, we hope, will be the least-used tool,” he said.

That creates the danger for Seesmic of putting its eggs in too many baskets. Users seem to want more features and faster service, but the company will find those more challenging to implement on multiple platforms. Le Meur says he’s held off the official launch of Seesmic until late April to iron out those very problems.

At the same time, he hopes Twhirl will blossom on its own, and become a central point for messaging of all sorts. It’s adding in Twitter competitors Pownce and Jaiku, and Le Meur suggested that instant messaging, Flickr streams and other applications could also make their way onto it.

Seesmic, yet another video-sharing site that encourages quick, conversational clips that can be recorded and replied to, is opening up for public use, with the waiting period for membership requests down to less than a day. It has also unveiled the names of some high-profile backers — even as it gets slammed by critics (here and here, for example).

Seesmic has been dubbed the “Twitter of video,” for the short snippets of video people post of themselves talking about whatever is on their mind. Others can just skim the videos, or reply to the messages they see, creating back-and-forth conversations.

The criticism is that video snippets aren’t as effective as text snippets. Unscripted recordings can be quite boring, and while short messages work with text (as Twitter has shown), videos aren’t as easily consumable. Other companies have tried, and failed, to do so-called “video mail” before. It’s a simple idea, and so if it were viable, it may have already existed.

However, there’s one problem with these criticisms: The service seems to be catching on with its initial base of users. Our own test of a short, silly recording elicited a half-dozen replies from around the world within an hour. The 1,500-plus alpha-test users pump out a steady stream of videos, which Seesmic edits to produce a daily show. (Although posting is limited to members, anyone can watch videos, by going here.)

With that in mind, we think it’s worth talking about how Seesmic could develop — and start to make money — when it opens fully.

One reason Seesmic may be successful is because it is offering clear guidance: Make it short and digestible. So people have an idea of what to record before they start. However, as more people pile on, the stream of new “conversations” will become daunting and confusing to newcomers. Seesmic is already addressing this by employing video editors to pick through the day’s videos and splice together the best parts. These “shows” can be catchy, if sometimes also odd and amateurish.

In the future, founder Loic le Meur told us, there will be tagged “trees” with different conversational branches. Seesmic would shuffle new videos into certain categories so that, for example, if you were into knitting, you could quickly find your way to videos of people talking about knitting, or actually knitting on camera.

Because users quickly accumulate a group of friends once they’re online, more features will go in to help channel your attention, like a daily, automatic “show” consisting of your closest friends’ video updates for the day. Popular videos by users that you don’t know will come to light separately through the daily Seesmic shows, or in the conversational branches.

New features Seesmic adds come solely from user requests, according to Le Meur.

To monetize, the site has several ideas, including a Flickr-like subscription model with additional features, sponsorships, and charging for mobile versions that send videos to your phone. However, like a number of other services (including Twitter), Seesmic is most interested in building a firm user base first.

The investor list is mostly comprised of high-profile angel investors. Among them are Ron Conway, VC Jeff Clavier, former AOL CEO Steve Case, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and TechCrunch maestro Mike Arrington (who has also given it plenty of coverage).

Despite the numerous video companies already launched, some investors continue to pine after video. Ron Conway, for example, has sprayed money at video companies, saying he still believes video represents a strong trend.

The remainder of the investor list: Jeff Pulver of Pulver.com, Martin Varsavsky of FON, Michael Parekh, Ariel Poler, Dan Gillmor, Steve Garfield, and Mark Pincus. The San Francisco company launched about four months ago.

updated
Thanks to the meteoric rise of YouTube, anyone with a video camera and an internet connection can be a star. More recently, they can live stream themselves to you 24/7, even from a mobile phone. Here we take a look at 14 companies competing in this sector.

Justin.TV, featuring a live cam of a guy named Justin in San Francisco, helped spearhead the new wave of popularity, but a host of other companies are battling for a piece of this market.

Hand in hand with the popularity of video streaming and downloads comes questions of legality. ViaCom, this past March, filed a lawsuit against YouTube for $1 billion for alleged copyright infringement, and the issue will only be exacerbated as users broadcast and stream live video from anywhere they can get a satellite signal or an internet connection, even, in fact, especially, from their mobile phone.

Lawsuits will arise as individuals find ways to usurp copyright material by taking their mobile phones to sporting events, movies, concerts or other events. Take the Patriots-Giants finale, originally scheduled to broadcast on only the NFL Network, but later opened up to simulcast on both NBC and CBS — raising the ire of some regional New England TV stations. Imagine a fan with a mobile device being able to live stream the game directly to an account with one of the services listed below.

For now, Live TV is just starting to take off, and below I present a select list of competitors, and why I love ‘em, hate ‘em and sometimes both. I prefer Kyte and Mogulus for being able to create and broadcast an innovative show, while UStream.TV has aligned with big-name personalities like The Plain White T’s that are fun to take a look at. In the Mobile sphere, Qik seems to be the dominant force, allowing users to stream mobile to internet with only a 5-second delay, but FlixWagon will be hot on its tails when it releases a public alpha in January. All companies should be on the look out though, as AT&T with its VideoShare allows mobile-to-mobile streaming, and while I resist listing a cell phone company as one of the most innovative, from what I’ve seen, it is the most impressive video-streaming technology so far.

Note: One common feature I noticed when checking these sites is that the user-generated content is often silly, bordering on the inane.

FlixWagon, a Tel-aviv company which has raised $1 million of funding, is a live video streaming service, allowing anyone with a 3G or WiFi enabled phone to broadcast live video on the web. According to SMS Text news, the company plans to support mobile-to-mobile streaming. Their alpha goes public beginning this new year.

The Good. Video seems to have higher quality than competitor Qik. Users can edit video info from their phone. Users don’t lose precious moments of broadcasts, thanks to a feature that stores video and saves for later viewing. Users can also broadcast alerts to friends and family and automatically upload their video to YouTube or Facebook.
The Bad. For the average user, their name and logo provides no clue about what the company’s purpose is.
The Ugly. FlixWagon supports only Nokia and Sony Ericsson handsets. Users have to download a mobile application.

Justin.tv helped launch life-casting into the consciousness of mainstream America. The company, founded in San Francisco by Justin Kan and Co. after selling Kiko on eBay, received $50,000 from Y Combinator and an undisclosed amount from Alsop Louie in October, and was originally a 24/7 window into the life of Justin. In October, it expanded into a public network, allowing anyone with a camera and computer to videocast their life.

The Good. Youtube meets Big Brother. Life-casting made simple.
The Bad. Why stalk friends through status updates if you can watch them everywhere they go? This site takes the word “voyeurism” to a whole new level.
The Ugly. Seriously, how exciting is it to watch and chat with Justine as she struggles to set up her vidcap or iJohn sleep?

LeWeb conference organizer, Loic Le Meur , with the backing of Ron Conway and Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington, founded Seesmic, which is sometimes described as a “video twitter.”

The Good. Users can stream straight to twitter, as well as borrow video from YouTube and place it in a personal video stream. For the future, Seesmic will enable users to record Skype conversations, video, chat, as well as share a piece of the revenue pie with content creators.
The Bad. Seems to be Last.fm meets Video Twitter…very confusing what the actual purpose is, and as many non-techies don’t even know what Twitter is, may take a while to catch on.
The Ugly. The links don’t seem to work on their page.

UStream.TV, a Riverside-based company with an undisclosed amount of funding that lists General Wesley Clark on its advisory board, is a site for live Web video broadcasting. They claim to be broadcasting 5,000 hours of video daily, with 300 broadcasts taking place at any given time. Ustream says 115,000 people have used the service, and that it has hosted entertainers including a Plain White Ts live concert as well as politicians, like Mitt Romney and GOP candidate Gov. Mike Huckabee.

The Good. Having big name stars such as Mitt Romney and Soulja Boy could perhaps give them an edge on competitors Live and recorded content. Easy search and categorized videos.
The Bad. Profile pages and design are a bit bland.
The Ugly. They seemingly don’t own UStreamTV.com

Kyte, the San Fransisco-based company launched December 2006, is also funded by Ron Conway (in Conway’s classic spread-your-bets fashion; he is really doubling up on video). Other backers include cellphone giant Nokia, as well as a long list of others, including Howard Hartenbaum, an early backer of Skype. Total backing is a significant $17.5 million. It allows users to create their own live TV shows and broadcast them on a live interactive channel, website, blog, social network or mobile phone.

[Update: The Good. Supports Windows Media and Symbian s60 phones. Presenting WIMAX enabled support at the CES, and also a Mobile Streaming/ Map mash-up.
The Ugly. Website is clunky.]
The Good. Slide meets CurrentTV. The “produce a show” feature using drag & drop is very easy to use. Kyte mobile is definitely a huge plus. Lets you chat (IM) as you watch. Easy to post everywhere.
The Bad. The video player itself is a bit too busy.
The Ugly. Some elements show design by a techie– TV littered with trackback comments. They also do not seemingly own their name-sake URL.

Developed by Visivo Communications in Santa Clara, Qik has been testing since November. Qik streams the video directly to the site, with only a 5-second delay. Robert Scoble has gone crazy about them.

The Good. Simple design. Almost Instantaneous. Qiks to Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.
The Bad. Several bad-quality videos. No mobile-to-mobile.
The Ugly. Requires a Nokia S60-enabled phone and must download software, barriers to entry for mainstream audience). Like other mobile products, you’ll require data plan (preferably unlimited).
[Update: Qik is working on both the Bad and the Ugly features that I didn't like about them].

ComVU, a Vancouver-based company, launched the world’s first mobile Webcasting service in February 2005. ComVu PocketCaster streams video from your phone to your video blog or homepage.

The Good. Supports a wider variety of phones.
The Bad. The website surprisingly has no video player on its home page. Qik and Flixwagon are better choices for the average user, but PocketCaster studio seems impressive.
The Ugly. Monthly subscription fee– a barrier for mainstream, but maybe worth it for enterprises. Website is clunky.

Floobs, an upcoming company from Finland, allows users to create a free television channel for broadcasting live, or prerecorded shows.

The Good. I wish there was something to put here.
The Bad. This is their about page.
The Ugly. A beta that doesn’t know whether it’s public or private and hasn’t been completely translated to English.
[Update: Is in closed beta during spring '08 before actual launch. Doesn't change what I said about it now knowing whether it's private or public]

Starting at $5.00/month, AT&T is letting users can share video mobile to mobile while on a voice call. See an example on the Tyra Banks Show.

The Good. Mobile-to-Mobile beats pointing your mobile browser to a Live TV site (and without investing in a data plan). Works with phones of different brands: (LG & Samsung). Going against a US mobile giant will be no easy task if the service isn’t better and/or cheaper.
The Bad. Five bucks a month (or pay as you go) is too much IF another service can deliver for free. No Website to view/archive videos.
The Ugly. Many people are wary of new contracts…you must have AT&T (or switch over) to take advantage — this may not create as much demand as the iPhone.

Mogulus, a New York startup which received $1.2 million back in May, is focused on live video production tools. The Mogulus tools allows users to “storyboard,” which allows for more TV-like content as users can drop recorded videos into the feed at cue and overlay graphics such as logos or titles.

The Good. Collaboration tools. One of only two companies with a Facebook application. Easy access to 26 videos. Nice editing features. Create a real channel. Very clean design/ presentation.
The Bad. I was getting slow load times to watch. A lot of steps just to start a channel.
The Ugly. Even slower load times when trying to produce a video.

Stickam, a Los Angeles based company that launched in March 2007, enables users to host live show stream and chat on their site as well as embed the stream in a personal site or blog. When not live, users can show pictures, audio, or recorded shows on a MySpace-like profile page.

The Good. More than just live streaming video, includes photos, videos, and audio right into profile.
The Bad. Pop-out boxes and opening new tabs almost never works.
The Ugly. If the average user waits 2.4 seconds for a page to load before skedaddling, I don’t know how Stickam has so many users with the very long load times.

Launched in May out of Israel, Blog TV, which received $3 million in seed funding from an Israeli VC, lets you start your own live show and chat. Users can record, broadcast video live, as the video will be automatically archived. The site also allows users to embed, rate, and recommend the videos.

The Good. Facebook app. Easy to watch, comment and share live video stream. [Update: The company has just added a feature letting you do a live split screen interview from different locations, record it and embed it in your site, which is new from what we can tell.]
The Bad. Design is a tad busy and rough on the edges.
The Ugly. The tag cloud for popular tags in the channels section need some serious fixing (-000 0000008august252006 01 does not help one find a channel)

Operator11 launched an Alpha version of a service that has been described as a “cross between MySpace, Jumpcut, YouTube, and AOL chat rooms.” The site allows users to not only live cast themselves, but also mix the live feeds with that of their friends, as well as upload videos to mix in the production.

The Good. Quirky but innovative — one of those hit or miss things. The reverse web-conferencing tool and video-commenting are simple and useful.
The Bad. Eight months in alpha — when will it become a Beta version? The name’s a mouthful — and it has numbers, which is always confusing.
The Ugly. Video quality is sketchy, and the main page has no volume control. Needs some structure — when entering the site, you’re not exactly sure of it capabilities/purpose.

David Adewumi is a contributing author for VentureBeat.

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