In my previous post on Seesmic I said...

For me the bottom line is this: Video chat is a stupid idea.  Its been around for ages (just check YouTube) and it hasn't caught on because most people don't want to chat that way.  Seesmic has executed on the idea as well as any company could but it still remains a stupid idea.

The post was already pretty long and I'd just come back from a night out with friends so it led me to be more brief than I would have preferred.  I felt really bad about that because I personally hate people who just say "x is a stupid idea" and think that's worth anything.  So I wanted to elaborate a little. 

I think a lot of information gathering is about the journey to get that information.  When you read something in writing you have a certain control over that journey.  You can skim, skip ahead, search for certain text and use any number of other tricks to quickly extract what you want out of the thing you are reading. 

This ability makes the written form ideal for normal people to convey information because the person writing does not necessarily have to be entertaining.  The reader can fairly quickly get what they need even if the writer isn't that good. 

Video on the other hand offers the person trying to get information no such control.  It actually requires you to sit through the entire thing, experiencing exactly what the creator of the video specified.  Because of this significant downside video creation requires a certain amount of talent to be effective. 

If you are going to express your thoughts in a video you need to be entertaining.

Otherwise the viewer is just going to give up and that is why asynchronous video chat is a lost cause.  People tend to ramble on too much and it's not worth dealing with if you aren't in the room with them.   Watch a few Seesmic videos and you'll see exactly what I mean.  Here's a verbatim quote from one of them...

"yeah...so...y'know...um...I started to...y'know...do the...the thing...and I...um...well I did...no...What I um...What I did was..."

That took 30 seconds worth of video for the guy to get out and it was horrible. Which is why Seesmic doesn't work.

There will always be a few people with far too much time on their hands who will buy into this sort of thing but everyone else will continue to avoid it like the plague.  Which is what makes it a stupid idea. 

So now I can consider my conscience clear.  That is,  in detail, why I think Seesmic type video chat is a stupid idea.  Probably more detail than you needed to know but at least it wasn't video so you could skip over parts.