Archive for the 'New Media' Category

SeesmicSeesmic has been gaining a lot of media attention, much of this however has been pretty negative. Mild mannered Loren Feldman (yeah right) of 1938 Media, didn’t hold his punches when describing the service. Being the cynic that I am, it wouldn’t surprise me to find that it was all just a front, aimed at raising public awareness, which indeed it has, as they say “all publicity is good publicity”. That’s not to say everything is right with this video conversation service. The user interface is very dated, harkening back to the early Flash based sites. The progress bars in particular drive me nuts, at least integrate them with the rest of the site, so they are unobtrusive.

The real disappointment however is the quality of videos recorded through the site, which not only suck, but for the most part are out of sync with the audio, making the resultant video just plain unusable. I’m pretty sure these issues will eventually be addressed, the site is after all in pre-alpha. You can also upload video, but why would I want to do this, when YouTube does it infinitely better.

The big question however is, who is Seesmic’s target audience. Video conversations just don’t work for me. I’d much rather use email, IM or the good old fashioned telephone. It’s certainly not good enough to use as a video blog. I thought it would be good to use as a way to capture quick hellos to my family back in England and friends around the world, this is only just passable, given the current state of the service.

Seesmic is certainly a service to keep an eye on, however there are many other companies vying for a piece of the video action and many of them have much nicer interfaces and services. Video is an interesting space at the moment. As bandwidth goes up and prices come down, higher and higher quality is now possible. 2008 is certainly going to be an interesting year.

So here it is, another social networking application, hoping to eek out it’s place as your social tool of choice. Twitter is still my favorite, even though I find myself not using it half as much as I used to. I also joined the Jaiku bandwagon, but I think for me, the first app I chose wins.

Pownce is an interesting deviation from the other tools, allowing you to send files, as well as messages, links and events, There’s no denying the desktop application is pretty. It also uses the new Adobe Air development environment. One of the major irritations I have with the desktop application is the inability to minimize to the system tray. There’s also a lack of web and mobile phone integration, but I’m sure they will be addressed in due course.

While this application comes from a development team that includes Danial Burka and Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, it still has a ways to go, to knock Twitter off it’s mighty perch for me.

For anyone interested, I’ve got 11 Pownce invites if anyone wants one. Just drop an email to pownce@newmedialaunchpad.com