BBC Technology editor Darren Waters got a privileged chat with Seesmic founder and prominent French entrepreneur Loic LeMeur in a London pub last night and was evidently impressed after a demo:
Within minutes of posting the video to Seesmic, he had replies from the community all around the world, including from members sat around the corner in the same bar.
LeMeur confirmed the company, which has $6m in funding, is working on a mobile phone version of Seesmic – although they had better hurry up given the plethora of startups already offering this service. The startup has backing from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and people like Ron Conway, one of the original investors in Google, and (interest declared) TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington (but that’s not why I’m posting this).
LeMeur will be in Davos at the World Economic Forum next week working with CNN who will use Seesmic video replies to questions posed by LeMeur on the channel as an experiment.
Seesmic already has a number of UK advocates and users, but some have been less than impressed by its somewhat tricky interface, calling it crappy, buggy, bloated [update: rest of the sentence was "adorable, prototype proof of concept thing they knocked up, but my legs are just tired from using bicycle pedals to fly an aeroplane."] and just plain crap. But then again it is still in an invite-only Alpha release.
heh! Friday afternoon mischief Mike? I’ll save your readers from the pain of clicking through to the post you link to (though thanks for the flow) and point out that the very next word after “crappy, buggy, bloated” was “adorable”.
I do love seesmic and I love the seesmic community. It is alpha software (still described as pre-alpha but let’s not get too involved in that distinction) and we are both the testers and the test scripts. As long as no-one has any greater expectations then I don’t think there’s a problem. The seesmic guys know that they have to keep developing the product and the exciting thing is that they are including the community in that development to a huge degree.
For those who think I just love everything that’s new and shiny, I did love twitter – I don’t LOVE facebook, we had some hot times together, but now it’s the morning after the night before.
I’ll second Lloyd. Mike, you’ve got a down on Seesmic, fair enough. We’ve all ranted about it, it really bugs us. But at the same time it is highly addictive and just lovely. Facebook? What?
You’ll note that I balance the reference to other’s criticism’s with “then again it is still in an invite-only Alpha release.”