Archive for May 12th, 2008

Seesmic: Initial Impressions and Use Case Proposal


Just this afternoon I’ve begun to experiment with an application known as Seesmic (still in Alpha). My early impression: Seesmic does for video communication what Twitter does for text chat.

While not restricting users to 140 characters in the same way Twitter does (the video constraints are yet to be investigated), the goal of Seesmic seems to be much the same; and that is to facilitate rapid, large-scale, publicly visibly, asynchronous discussions.

The user experience

To participate, users only need to create an account and post a video clip. This can either be a brand new post, or a response to an existing conversation; and the clip can be recorded directly to the site or pre-recorded and then uploaded. In the case of the latter option, uploaded videos are immediately available with absolutely no processing time.

By comparison, YouTube - despite the technical infrastructure Google has to offer - takes several minutes for similar recordings to become available, and even longer for uploaded video (processing times for videos uploaded to Seesmic has not yet been tested).

That said though it’s important to bear in mind the differences in scale between Seesmic and YouTube. YouTube’s user load and network traffic are astronomically high, whereas Seesmic’s is conceivably far, far less.

Nonetheless, seeing a video you just recorded seconds before already available is very impressive to the end user.

New video clips are continuously appearing in a menu on the left side of the page, with brand new clips displayed at the top of the menu along with a reference to the number of responses the clip has received. Users are not required to refresh the page to view new content; updates are loaded automatically as new material becomes available. This serves to substantially increase the interactivity of the user experience to the point where it borders on synchronous discussion in both look and feel.

In my case, the clip I posted in which I asked  “How is Seesmic different from YouTube?“, received a response in less than 5 minutes.

The technical side

On the technical side of things, Seesmic appears to be Flash-based, which has opened the door to a seriously impressive Graphical User Interface (GUI) that capitalises on the hyper-dynamic nature of Flash applications.

On the video front, the visual quality of clips recorded directly to site is incredible. While video noise is present in both the clips I recorded, the overall quality was crystal clear and among the best I’ve seen in the realm of large-scale user-generated online video - this includes YouTube, Ustream, and Yahoo Live.

Compared to similar clips I’ve recorded directly to YouTube using the exact same equipment for example (laptop, lighting, location, and network), the results I experienced with Seesmic were substantially better.

Observations

Text commenting does not seem to exist: Curiously I don’t recall seeing any functionality for leaving text comments. The implication, as supported by Seesmic’s “Join the discussion” tagline, seems to be that comments are expected to be video-based, not text base. Whether this omission is a detriment, an advantage, or neither is unclear; however it is definitely an unusual move on the part of the Seesmic developers.

Unclear whether private messaging exists: Equally unclear is the question of whether private messaging exists in Seesmic. To continue the comparison, in the case of Twitter users have the ability to send one another direct messages that are not visible to other users. Seesmic does offer a degree of interoperability with Twitter, with the ability to send “@user” messages to Twitter users with a link to the video, however it’s unknown whether this extends to private messaging as well - either between Seesmic and Twitter, or locally between Seesmic users only. I’ll be looking into this further

Channels or groups would be useful: I’m still in the early phases of my Seesmic evaluation, however one aspect is immediately clear: the ability to create topic-specific channels or groups would be incredibly valuable. Especially from the standpoint of learning, like Twitter, there is a tremendous amount of activity and information-flow that occurs in Seesmic - to the point where it could easily become overwhelming. Therefore it would be a fantastic thing to be able to drill own into topical areas where the video clips that you see are related to a specific subject matter.

This functionality may already exist in Seesmic. I hope it does. If not, I would hope that the driving forces behind the application are open to the suggestion.

Developing a Use Case

Realistically, you can’t properly evaluate the potential of an application that is based on group participation as an individual, so I’d like to suggest the formulation of a group of educators, educational technologists, and IT people that would seek to take Seesmic for a spin.

For example, as a preliminary use case we could compile a list of interesting basic topics or agenda items for discussion and then use Seesmic as the mechanism through which the conversation takes place. Then having done this we could reflect on what aspects of the experience were positive, negative or completely unexpected.

If you’re interested in participating please leave a comment and we can get started.

In the meantime I’ll continue to pursue my personal evaluation of Seesmic and will post updates as they become available.

References:

Monday, May 12th, 2008

digital media, web communication 2 Comments