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.

I was going to let this go.  I saw it Saturday morning and was a little annoyed by the responses...but I let it go.  I saw it Saturday afternoon, but still chose to pass on it.  But now its Sunday Morning and it's still near the top of Techmeme which has effectively worn down my resistance. 

(Plus its 2 am here and its still 78 degrees which tends to put a person in a bit of a cranky mood)

Seesmic is a "video micro blogging" service which aims to be like Twitter but with video instead of short text messages.  This weekend the service scored a coup by getting Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Cate Blanchett, Shia Laboeuf and Karen Allen to use the service to answer questions for journalists

(none of those questions were on the movie Scrooged to my own personal disappointment, I love that movie). 

Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur posts the whole "behind the scenes" story of how this event came about here. 

First let me say this is a brilliant marketing move.  Getting these celebrities on Seesmic will get the startup mainstream attention that it desperately needs and might actually get the public to realize there are video services other than YouTube in the world. 

What bothers me though is the "Techmeme common knowledge" that this somehow validates Seesmic.  It doesn't. 

(Has anyone ever used "Techmeme Common Knowledge" before?  Seriously, I think I just coined that)

Lets say I come up with the stupidest startup idea ever, call it Binarymic.  On Binarymic people type messages to each other like Twitter but they do it in Binary instead of ASCII text.  I guarantee you, if I could get Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford to answer questions on Binarymic there would be throngs of reporters lined up to type out their little 1 and 0 based questions. 

Would that mean that the market was ripe for binary based chat?  Doubtful...

(I personally find counting in binary quite relaxing, just for the record)

People will do anything to chat with celebrities and that's a pretty established fact.  So the problem with this promotion is that it doesn't validate the idea behind Seesmic which is that people want to chat with each other via video.  In fact, in a 2 hour session the stars managed to answer about 16 questions proving Seesmic to be as inefficient as a system of chat could be.

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. 

(I mean, people WANT to see Hollywood Directors and Movie Stars.  I'm not sure the same is true for the people you talk to on the Internet)

That all said, I'd like to close with this thought...

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(Poignant...I know)