Ryan A Graves.com

So I know I’m fairly late to try out 12seconds.tv but I’ll blame that on my love appreciation for Seesmic. I have friends on Seesmic, some that I’ve met their and some that I’ve met in “real life”. Never the less a new “video twitter” social software is out called 12seconds.tv. As you may have guest (cause you’re a damn genius) the videos that you can post are capped at 12 seconds. Similar to Twitter’s 140 character limit 12seconds.tv limits your content.

Some people argue that this will improve one’s ability to scan many videos quickly making it more “checkable” and some argue that the content you can post in 12 seconds is bound to be terrible and thus not worth “checking” in the first place. Either way that is not what has attracted me to 12seconds.tv.  What has made me begin to use 12seconds.tv is that you can email in 12 second video to a custom to your account URL and they will automatically post to your account. Cool, right? Right. The reason that this is so cool is because most any cell phone now can take video and most any cell phone can send email and 1+1=2 right. So video + email = practically live videos directly to the web!

I’ve become a huge fan of video on the web. I have have my video posts with Ryan G TV, I very regularly use Seesmic, and I religiously use Twitter, and now I have short video’s from my mobile phone with 12seconds.tv.

Loic as soon as you guys at Seesmic give me the ability to send in vids from my mobile I’ll drop 12seconds.tv because honestly I don’t like the time limit. But for now this is easy and its accessible to the masses and that is what will make any web app work!

See widget to the right! ———————————>

Idea of the week led by Kevin Rose inspired some very interesting conversation on the uses of location based technology and also Twitter (surprise surprise). Thanks Kevin for getting this going… These are the types of convo’s that I hope would occur more on Seesmic.

As many know Facebook held their annual developers conference yesterday at the San Fransisco Design Center. The agenda (shared below) emphasized three main changes coming to FB: more sharing, simplification, and getting developers more involved. There were a few main sites that will now be much more integrated with Facebook such as Digg and Seesmic! The live blog of that event was covered extremely well over at TechCrunch.

The question that was never answered fully is one that Max Levchin founder of Slide asked, “is Facebook going to create more contracted agreements with app development houses?” I can see why Max would obviously love that as one of the premier app developers. However, I don’t see that as such a great thing for Facebook or the development community as a whole. If Facebook starts entering into contractual relationships with the “big swinging dicks” of app development (Slide, RockYou) then the “little guy” development houses will not be able to participate or continue to  feed the Facebook app community with innovative ideas. Keeping things open and available for anyone has been the strategy for Facebook to grow their development platform since the beginning and judging by the excitement and attendance of yesterdays event it looks likes it has been working quite well!

So Mark, listen, keep the platform open. Give the little guys a chance at “making it big”. There are a lot of great start-ups out there that would love to use the Facebook platform to change the way people use the web but if you cut “deals” with these big dogs of the FB app world the small man is out of the game. Give’m a chance.

*I just saw this morning that my Facebook profile has been updated and wanted to share a small portion of the new look.

Agenda:

12:00 - 1:30 pm: Doors Open

Registration & Exhibitor Area Open

1:30 - 3:00 pm: Keynote, Mark Zuckerberg

3:30 - 4:15 pm: Breakouts Round 1

User Experience: Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More

Technical: Building to Facebook Scale

Business: Building a Business on Facebook

4:30 - 5:15 pm: Breakouts Round 2

User Experience: Integrating Facebook Connect into your Website

Technical: Advanced App Building

Business: Marketing your App on Facebook

Workshop: App Building 101

5:15 - 6:00 pm: Break

6:00 - 6:45 pm: Breakouts Round 3

User Experience: Building Great Applications on Facebook

Technical: Feed & Social Distribution

Business: Entreprenuership on Facebook Platform

7:00 - 7:45 pm: Breakouts Round 4

User Experience: Design & User Experience at Facebook

Technical: Made for Mobile

Business: fbFund - A look inside - Seeding Opportunity on Facebook

Workshop: Taking your Platform Application Global

8:00 - 12:00 am: After 8 Celebration

*Photos courtesy of Brian Solis

This is a direct post from Loic Lemeur’s blog. I respect Loic very much and think that his thoughts on entrepreneurship and social software are worth sharing…

This is the type of content that we will be excited to share on ActionsTalk.com from entrepreneurs who are experiencing these challenges.

Challenges of an entrepreneur

-find a space (not an idea) and execute as fast as possible
-differentiate and innovate, no copycat
-launch fast in alpha and iterate, do not wait for a perfect product
-gather an initial community and get its constant feedback to improve the product based on the feedback
-find funding fast and try not to lose too much time on it
-gather a kick ass team (top challenge: engineers, especially in the bay area…)
-scale, open as fast as possible the service
-communicate constantly with the community
-keep momentum going after initial launch
-stay on your main market or localize fast?
-manage an international team (Seesmic is already on 3 continents…)
-create a great API and gather a developer community
-integrate in major social software (see my social map post)
-reach critical mass
-find the business model and grow revenues

Social software trends

-content versus conversation
-decentralized instead of centralized on blogs in the past
-immediate versus lots of thoughts (microblogging versus long posts)
-”disposable”
-open (API, open source)
-open customer service (see getsatisfaction)
-sharing as much as possible with the community to enhance the service
-more human (a face on the Internet users, Seesmic helps this in video)
-live versus asynchroneous
-the web in the pocket (iphone, Nokia n95) changes the deal
-ecommerce and recommendations through the filter of your friends instead of marketing
-news finds you through your friends instead of getting it from reading mainstream media home pages

Today I decided to experiment a little bit…and it worked. Listen to some of the replies…

This is a pretty cool site that lets you search a persons Seesmic videos visually using the thumbnails that are created for each video. As you can see from the screen shot it is not that useful for finding a specific video because really it just becomes a collage of thumbnails of the same persons face. But I thought it would be worth pointing out the new ways that people are using Seesmic to create rich interfaces for video and video blogging on the web . This was created by Ben Metcalf aka: dot.Ben.

Check it out and search your user name here.

As much as I’m a fan of Seesmic and and of the entrepreneurial process, I thought I would post this video that highlights both. This is Loic’s explanation of how he went about raising money for Seesmic and how he will continue to go out evangelizing Seesmic. There is a lot to learn from this guy…

So you may think that I’m obsessed with Seesmic of late and you’d probably be right. I like it, I think its a great idea with a lot of legs and I think that video on the internet will continue to take up more and more of the web.

This video is an interesting take on Seesmic from the perspective of a journalist. He talks about the idea of using the video as practice for better journalism. However he does draw the difference between online video (youtube, seesmic) and regular television journalism.

This is proof that Seesmic will last because it shows how many different people/markets can find value in the product.