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I want to like Seesmic
A few months ago I heard that Loic was starting a new company, Seesmic, to work on video conversations and I felt a bit of relief that someone who clearly understands how to build web momentum was going to focus a group on this important problem. Loic is a classic connector and seems to be everywhere at once while simultaneously twittering it and recording it for his video posts.
So, a couple of days ago I scored an invite (via Twitter, of course) and logged into the beta expecting to find something rough but sexy, like Tura Satana in FP,K!K!.
Here's what I found:
When trying a beta I like to go in and just try to enjoy myself at first, with no prodding of APIs, and no poking at edge cases. So with Seesmic I simply tried to enjoy the global timeline, skimming backwards in time watching the posts with interesting names. Unfortunately, I found that most posts were in replies to comments from way back in the timeline so they lost their context and (like most replies to things on the net) were of the "me, too" or "this one time, in band camp" variety. So, I needed a different tactic.
I did post two short video comments, but despite the fact that I like to make screencasts, I just didn't feel comfortable with unscripted mugging about, and I actually couldn't find a single post in the previous day worth comment upon. So, unsurprisingly nobody replied.
Loic and team seem to be responding to the user comments and they're working hard on threaded views which will eliminate the global timeline. I hope that the designers knew that the timeline wouldn't scale past a very small community of people and the threads were planned all along, but I'm not sure based on some of the other decisions. They're spending a lot of time on the look and feel but core pieces of functionality like skimming and threading seem more essential than 3D widgets.
It's also a bit of a throwback that they're building the app as One Big Flash Widget, making the same mistake as the Flickr beta. The web is most powerful when you take advantage of the rich amalgam of different media hung on HTML. Hopefully the Seesmic team will learn this lesson as quickly as the Flickr folks, because the web really needs someone to nail online asynchronous conversations for people who aren't text-based.
I'll keep Seesmic in my daily browse as long as Loic and crew are so responsive to feedback, but it's clear they have their work cut out for them.
