Seesmic buys a Twitter client: a big step for desktop micro-broadcasting
So, overhyped social tool Seesmic has acquired the popular Twitter client, Twhirl. Desktop clients, have been an important part of its success, it’s far less compelling to load up Twitter.com all the time.
I hope Seesmic didn’t pay much for Twirl: only so much as it would cost them to develop it in house, and not a cent more. Mainly that’s because there are loads of Twitter clients out there, many very good, and the barriers to switching are largely nonexistent - in fact, alternative clients are advertised right within Twhirl (see right >>), powerful advertising since it’s an implicit recommendation from your contacts. At least they get a good Adobe AIR coder, and some cross-selling opportunities to Twhirl users.
Media for a long time pre-Internet was consolidated in the hands of huge, singular broadcasters like the BBC, TimeWarner, newspapers, radio stations. Now, members of the public can broadcast themselves (I won’t pass judgement here as to whether that’s particularly valuable to society… the techno-utopian says yes, the techno-cynic says no)
When I post short blocks of text to Twitter, short posts on my blog, a quick video to YouTube, etc, I’m broadcasting myself in micro-format compared to the 30 minute format standard TV broadcast. This is being done from my very own desktop (including browser, mobile, playstation, etc), not in a professional studio/newsroom. This studio-> desktop transition is the same seismic shift as that seen in digital graphics and typesetting during the 80s and 90s). What I suspect motivates Seesmic’s M+A is this: just like Adobe, Corel et al got big on the back of a desktop revolution in publishing, Seesmic feels it can capitalise on the desktop (micro-)broadcasting revolution by building a unified program that people can use as a gateway to broadcasting themselves to various places on the web.
Prediction: 2008/2009 is going to witness many surprise moves in the micro-broadcasting space. Here are some wild guesses to spark your imagination:
- Google could use its YouTube brand to move into media services. If it can face the staggering bandwidth requirements, it could expand beyond video. People already use it to publish their mp3s without a video (with just a static photo e.g. here). This means it becomes a media/publisher services platform (just like Amazon is transforming into a retail services firm; you can use its warehouses, its website, its servers, and soon, its financial IT). Google will seek ways, likely via YouTube, to host or aggregate micro-broadcasting. Perhaps with a purchase of Friendfeed.
- Microsoft Live! will release a unified desktop micro-broadcasting program that lets you microblog (140-character text message) or microvlog (short video blog) and upload it to Twitter or Seesmic respectively (and others of course; ideally they want you to use Microsoft Live). Might also include tools to make your own podcasts.
- Your turn: Facebook will…
Also, what are the odds on Microsoft buying Skype? Stranger things have happened.
Related:
- Twitter summary 28/03/2008
- I’ve been truly sucked into the asynchronous, broadcast instant messaging of Twitter. It’s a little bizarre, but very compelling, especially when you have a desktop client running in the bottom right hand corner (I use Spaz). Here is a dump of twitters posted in the last week. I’ve left out the ones I used to coordinate meeting with people. You can directly follow the ’stream of consciousness’ here I’m wondering what happened to Channel 4’s big, audacious move into radio? “radio silence”, as they say… 10:15 PM March 21, 2008 loving the new Cut Copy album. As good as the rumours said it was 01:09 AM March 22, 2008 note to self: don’t eat a whole G+D banana split when trying to work - i feel like I might pass out. mmm, auspicious heaviness… 06:50 PM March 22, 2008 Just watched A Scanner Darkly. Amazing. Amazing cinematography, soundtrack by Radiohead, great cast, and a story by Philip K Dick, a genius 11:36 PM March 22, 2008 @mbites Elvis Costello will sell you an empty box http://tinyurl.com/35b4g8 01:20 AM March 23, 2008 @dubber needs mentors? jeeesus, what about us mere mortals - stop hogging the IP! 02:44 PM March 25, 2008...
- What’s to come: the future of social media consumption
- With broadband penetration (and capacity) increasing, and music devices increasingly connected to WiFi (iPod Touch, iPhone) or to 3G (Nokia’s big music push; laptops), the general consensus is that the future lies in media streaming, not the traditional stored music collections (be it shelves of LPs, stacks of CDs and DVDs, or hard drives full of mp3s and DiVX). A few years from now, you and all your friends will be consuming music online, on demand, from a myriad of different sources. If you use Mozilla Songbird, you can already pull in all the music posted on music blogs and Hype Machine into an iTunes-like virtual music library. Even more than infinite diversity of on demand music, the killer app for free (probably ad-supported) streaming media is that anyone can access it from anywhere in the world - they just need a link to it (unlike the mp3’s on your iPod). That’s the simple little thing that suggests we’re in for a REVOLUTION in the way we consume and discover music. The logic is simple: Someone will setup a service which, when you stream music or a video anywhere on the web, will alert all your friends (that have signed...
- Productivity in the enterprise - Twitter-style
- I wonder if companies should consider setting up an internal (password protected) tool called Prologue Basically it’s a private blog (hosted on a platform, in this case Wordpress.com) where you and your fellow employees can broadcast micro-updates to the rest of the org (very efficiently - you could plug the RSS feed of your coworker updates straight into your RSS reader or Outlook/Entourage, etc). I love the innovation these guys have shown - this is just a special Wordpress skin that does something clever with the Twitter microblog idea, delivering a lot of use to organisations and groups. Simple and clever. I like. Bookmark/Share: sociallist_51518770_url = 'http://www.overthecounterculture.com/2008/seesmic-buys-a-twitter-client-a-big-step-for-desktop-micro-broadcasting/'; sociallist_51518770_title = 'Seesmic buys a Twitter client: a big step for desktop micro-broadcasting'; sociallist_51518770_text = ''; sociallist_51518770_tags = 'broadcasting,Internet,media,microbroadcasting,Seesmic,Twitter,videoblogging'; ...
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