Why I’m choosing YouTube over Seesmic for instant video publishing

By Daniel J. Pritchett on January 26, 2009

: Image via CrunchBase

UPDATE: Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur showed up shortly after this post went up with a strong defense of his product. Check the comments at the bottom of the post to see his contribution!

Let’s start here: embedded Seesmic videos don’t show up in Google Reader. I can’t say for sure what fraction of this site’s readers are coming in through Google Reader but that’s still a cause for concern and led me to reevaluate my choice of Seesmic. Here’s how that looks:

Seesmic has some good qualities

I chose Seesmic primarily because I’ve seen people putting it to good use on FriendFeed. The site bills itself as a video conversation starter. Push a button, record a quick video into your webcam, and presto – it’s out there in the Seesmic stream along with all of the other new videos. Members of the Seesmic community can watch and reply to your video. The video can be easily embedded into an external site. Your Seesmic videos will be easily slurped up by your FriendFeed if you’ve got one. That’s the good stuff.

There are several things I didn’t like about Seesmic though. The aforementioned Google Reader problem is one thing, but perhaps more aggravating is the lack of stats. I’m sure this comes off as spoiled and a bit neurotic, but I’ve come to expect the ability to see how many people are viewing or sharing things I publish. Twitter’s got it’s transparent retweets. FriendFeed has likes and comments for all to see. Sitemeter and Google Analytics show how many people visit a page, where they came from, how long they stayed, what they were looking for, and a ton more data.

YouTube beats Seesmic in a few key areas

: Image via CrunchBase

I didn’t find any of that on Seesmic. What I did find is that YouTube has its own instant publishing feature. I’d probably have noticed that earlier if I made a habit of staying logged in to YouTube. I know for a fact that YouTube provides an obscene amount of detail on who views which videos when and from where.

Honestly, I’d probably be happy with a single hit counter, but that level of detail is nice to have. YouTube videos will most certainly show up in Google Reader – they’re naturally getting past the Google whitelist. You’ve no doubt already seen YouTube’s “video response” feature. This seems an awful lot like what Seesmic does, albeit with less emphasis on the conversation aspect of things.

Last but not least, YouTube’s got a bajillion viewers already. It’s the number two search engine on the web. Seesmic can’t really compete there. I suppose by tagging along with the leading player in the market I’m promoting a monopoly in video hosting and search, but that’s where I’m going today.

Credits: Thanks Mona Nomura, Ken Stewart, and the rest of the LG team for discussing video publishing with me. I’m sure you’ve each got your own ideas on which video publishing service meets your needs and why. I’d love to see you post them!

Search and filter tweets using Friendfeed advanced search (onlinejournalismblog.com)
YouTube Now Has Trending Topics Too (mashable.com)
Feedly Adds New Ways To Explore The Blogosphere (techcrunch.com)

Posted in Sharing at Work | Tagged friendfeed, google, Google Reader, louis gray, search, Search engine, Search Engines, seesmic, twitter, video, Web search engine, YouTube

http://friendfeed.com/dpritchett Daniel J. Pritchett

My choice boils down to this: YouTube has Google’s support as well as a lot more mindshare. I’m sure Seesmic will do okay in its own niche but it’s not going to give me what I’d hoped for in terms of quick video blogging.
http://friendfeed.com/techsnaps Glenn Batuyong

what’s stopping you from doing both?
http://friendfeed.com/dpritchett Daniel J. Pritchett

I’m not cancelling my Seesmic account and I’ll probably use it again to make a video comment to a DISQUS-enabled blog when the mood strikes me. The only place I’m switching to YouTube is for instant pubslishing, where I record a one-off video and then embed it in a blog post. I am really enjoying the ability to record a video directly in the browser without having to worry about encoding or uploading the file.
http://friendfeed.com/isthisstupid Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

Daniel, the only way I’ve used Seesmic is recording through the browser, I’ve not once uploaded one.
http://friendfeed.com/dpritchett Daniel J. Pritchett

Tina, I must have done a poor job of explaining myself here. I chose Seesmic to do the instant publishing, and then I discovered that YouTube did exactly what I wanted from Seesmic but better. I’m sure there will be a reason for me to use Seesmic for something else one day, just not for this. Previously I’d thought of YouTube as being a place to upload files, not a place to do direct recording.
http://www.loiclemeur.com loicdirect@gmail.com

Hello Daniel, I am the founder of Seesmic and would like to thank you for your feedback, even negative, as it shows how interested you are in what we do. You are totally right, we need stats and we need google reader whitelisting. Both are coming in the next weeks and I hope it will help you get back to seesmic for casual video. Now one thing you probably did not notice on YouTube is that recording or uploading a video regardless of with or withour a webcam takes about 20 minutes to process while we publish them in a matter of seconds. That is one of the reasons I bothered launching Seesmic at all. Seesmic aims at being to YouTube what Twitter is to blogging. Casual, fast, cool. We aim at giving you the best of both worlds as we started integrating Seesmic with YouTube. Right now you can publish YT videos on Seesmic and we are building posting Seesmic videos to your YouTube channel. Hope to see you back when (or before) we have what you miss. Thank you again in any case. Loic.

http://www.sharingatwork.com Daniel J. Pritchett

Loic, it's very impressive to see that your team is on top of these issues. The fact that Seesmic embeds so easily into DISQUS and FriendFeed is a great selling point already and I think if the stats and Reader issues go away I probably will go back to using Seesmic as my primary instant video publishing tool.

Thanks for taking the time to explain your plans here! It certainly won't take much to convince me to give you and other smaller players in the video market a fair shake. As much as I appreciate what YouTube's done for us I think we can all agree that a competitive market benefits the community.

http://www.loiclemeur.com/ Loic Le Meur

thanks Daniel, stats are already enabled on our next push, should be there
soon and Google said we are now whitelisted, need to wait a few weeks for
their next push. Hope to see you back!
Loic

http://pixelbits.wordpress.com/ Mona N.

Daniel – Google. Juice. I would go with YouTube since I presume you would want an audience base outside of the Soc Net realm.

http://www.sharingatwork.com Daniel J. Pritchett

Mona, you've cut right to the business case for using YouTube – it's got a bigger following and will doubtless bring more traffic. All the same I can't help but feel a bit of an obligation to try out the other entrants into the market and do my best to publicize their successes. Choices like this remind me of Hutch Carpenter's recent Angels and Demons of Our Social Media Souls chart.

http://sean808080.com sean808080

Interesting take on what is important to you regarding video publishing. I wouldn't think google reader embedding and having the largest number of eyes are important at all to the typical seesmic user since seesmic is really all about the conversation and the quality of the dialogue.

Don't get me wrong, I love youtube and the sheer number of videos some of which are funny as all hell. Have you seen Charlotte takes a tumble? That shit still makes me laugh deep belly laughs.

It's just that for some of us, the criteria that drive us to continue using seesmic are the _responsiveness_ of the team there as shown by Loic's response to your blog post. Loic and his team are everywhere and always listening to feedback to improve their product. Can we say the same about youtube or any google product for that matter?

In fact, I was so impressed by the speed and quality of seesmics response to a kerfuffle that happened a few months back, that I blogged about it here:

http://sean808080.com/blog/seesmic-raising-the-...

For my purposes and many others, this responsiveness and also having the ability to create private video conversations for our teams is really a driver and the noises I hear is that seesmic will enable this shortly. If/when that happens, I think you'll see a whole lot more meaningful talk between teams and families taking place on seesmic.

Thanks for sharing your take. Different strokes for different folks!

http://www.sharingatwork.com Daniel J. Pritchett

Thanks for taking the time to share your positive experiences with Seesmic, Sean. I must admit I'm a neophyte in the video publishing arena. My recent posts on the topic have simply chronicled my experiences trying out a few different services and trying to use them for my purposes.

I think where my use case differs from yours is that I'm initially approaching Seesmic as a selfish end user: What is this “Seesmic” thing and what can it do for me”? You've clearly gone a step above and started exploring the ways that you can contribute to the the burgeoning Seesmic community. Assuming I find reasons to keep using the service I'll probably get there myself.

Loic's quick response to my lukewarm review of his product is certainly admirable and I agree that it's not the sort of behavior I'd expect to see from Google. In fact Loic's personalized approach to customer service reminds me strongly of the style of Jason Goldberg, the CEO of SocialMedian. Jason spent much of last year personally promoting his service and keeping up with individual users. How did that work out for Jason? He recently sold his company to Xing for a few million dollars. Clearly Loic's in good company and I hope he can keep it up.

http://webtechlaw.com pauljacobson

I have only just seen this thread so it may be old news already. I was initially sceptical of Seesmic and found that the more I use it the more I enjoy it. My only real regret is that I have limited bandwidth which prevents me from engaging in it more fully. Of course Loïc's personal approach to feedback just inspires me even more to use the service.

That being said I use other video hosting services for other videos which I produce for work or to share with family. I don't use YouTube, largely because I feel that there are other options out there that feel better to me. I know it sounds a bit odd but YouTube just feels too busy and too impersonal with the volume of content up there so I use Vimeo for personal videos and a local video service called Zoopy.com for my business videos.

http://www.sharingatwork.com Daniel J. Pritchett

I like the suggestion to use multiple services, and I agree with you that YouTube is a bit impersonal. Have you tried TubeMogul or anything like it for posting videos to multiple sites? I'm trying to decide if I have a use for that. My feeling right now is that I really like Seesmic-style instant publishing and I am not ready to get into video editing, so I probably don't need multiple destinations.

http://webtechlaw.com pauljacobson

Our bandwidth constraints make posting to multiple sites pretty costly so I tend to post to one location and let services like FriendFeed or Twitter spread the word.

http://www.sharingatwork.com Daniel J. Pritchett

I *think* TubeMogul lets you upload a video to a central location before
they redsitribute it for you. If I am right then that would allow you to
distribute widely without any additional local bandwidth cost. I'll have to
test it later to see if this is accurate.

Why I’m choosing YouTube over Seesmic for instant video publishing

Seesmic has some good qualities

YouTube beats Seesmic in a few key areas

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