A Guide to the Seesmic Look Launch Video
January 24, 2010
If you haven’t seen it, this is a good but very long video announcing an interesting new product from Seesmic. It’s my job to be a curator, so I’ll break it down and you can watch it according to what I think is interesting, or according to what you think is …
The intro, by Daryll McDade, a Microsoft mouthpiece, is very skippable. Start at Minute 4.
From minute 4 to 40 there is a slow, yet important, video from shiv singh (razorfish) talking about influence marketing. He could have made it into a 25-minute talk, but I highly recommend catching his major themes and skimming through them (if you’re interested in the Net Promoter Score, hang on until minute 30). Razorfish is doing interesting things, and he’s leading the charge. This is a good talk. Don’t miss it.
At minute 40, Loic demos the new Seesmic Look, which is worth seeing, and at the end he brings it back to how brands should interact with consumers. Look is not for authors as much as it is for making the Twitter consumption experience a more TV-like approach to reading tweets. It’s hard to appreciate that this is a new cool thing, when it still looks like shortened words in thought bubbles. You can’t see the pages people refer to in the URLs they include in their tweets, you can’t see the connections among ideas, you can’t see relevant threads, follow idea trails, discover new views, or integrate it with your interests in any real-time way. It’s a start on how consumers will engage in the real-time Web. It does a better job surfacing the content, but not the connections. In two years, it’ll be road kill, but at the moment, it’s better than using the Twitter client (anything is). I recommend it for people like me who don’t use Twitter (at all).
At minute 69, loic introduces a guy named kevin from Red bull who has set up a seesmic look channel. Nothing too exciting here, but easier for people to see the various people associated with a brand. You can imagine what he says without having to watch this part. You can also imagine that the company benefits from this and we’re talking about real commerce here. You can’t ignore it, so do something, and this something is a decent start.
At minute 1:06, Josh from the Huffington Post talks about how they are trying to integrate their viewers with their news business. They are trying. It’s predictable, but worthwhile. Something interesting may come of it, because Huffpost *wants* to integrate with its consumers. The more Huffpost makes it easy for person-to-person communication around their content, the better. Seesmic Look is not the ne plus ultra tool for this, but it’s better than blog comments.
Then at minute 1:15, a woman named Jennifer from Kodak comes on to show that Kodak hasn’t died. Yet.
At 1:20, Loic summarizes and hints that if you want to throw a ton of money at him, he’ll help you create a Twitter channel for your company, too. I think you can skip this.
At 1:24 a guy named Steve Rubel from Edelman says “We’re going from a web of pages, to a web of streams.” He says “Brands can and should be curators.” He talks about scalability and how bankrupt our information culture is becoming. He says “Mobile makes [the problem] worse, not better.” He says “Friends will trump everything else,” explaining how we are dealing with information overload. Then he says, “The news finds me, I don’t find the news.” He talks about the “snack format” of information consumption. He sums up by saying 1) companies/brands need to build digital embassies (I talked about this in my 1999 book); 2) you need to send different messages differently to different audiences in different venues; and 3) he says Use the Force – embrace Twitter, don’t fight it.
If anyone knows this guy, I’d like to send him one of my books. Please hook us up by email, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
My comments:
1. I think we’re at the point where Twitter has just gone from early majority to making the transition to late majority. That means Twitter membership/viewership should much more than double in 2010. It’s safe to assume that Twitter accounts will end the year at over 100m. Many of these laggards will want to consume real-time blogs leaning back, rather than forward. That makes the timing of this product just about right.
2. Tweets still have these insane little http://bit.ly/86yifcr insertions, which is NOT going to serve the late majority. Some future version of Look is going to HAVE to show relevant parts of each of those pages, and make the screen actually come alive, rather than text in thought bubbles and lots of complicated URLs.
3. Seesmic Look is only for Windows at the moment. I suppose some day it will be web native, without having to be a download. I hope the last person downloads the last app in 2015 and we run everything in the browser after that.
I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Now for my public-service announcements:
I’m looking for a Twitter volunteer to join our group of enthusiastic volunteers at ThePowerOfPull.com with our tweets. Contact me if you want to help.
If anyone has a preference between hootsuite and seesmic, let me know. If you have used OrSiSo, I would love to hear about your experience.
Next: Mesh Networks
