Ang Peregrino Recommends 48: Seesmic

Seesmic
URL: http://​seesmic​.com/

Seesmic is a new way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing via video con­ver­sa­tion. It’s the evo­lu­tion of social net­work­ing using video. When you join the Seesmic com­mu­nity, you expe­ri­ence a new way of express­ing your­self, mak­ing friends, join­ing in active con­ver­sa­tions, and engag­ing in real inter­ac­tions with real peo­ple. Since Google bought YouTube two years ago, a slew of video sites have arrived on the web. Seesmic is one to watch. While YouTube has become dom­i­nated by spoofs, skits and pro­fes­sional mar­ket­ing videos, Seesmic hopes to recap­ture the spirit of those who first made the site a suc­cess: peo­ple who want to put video diaries on the internet.

It’s easy to use, if you have the tech­nol­ogy avail­able: Record a video directly on Seesmic’s web­site, mobile phone or upload an exist­ing video straight from your com­puter or link to a video posted on a social network.

The Seesmic plat­form also enables video con­ver­sa­tions on more than a thou­sand sites, blogs and broad­casts them to other social soft­ware such as Twit­ter and Friend­feed thanks to its robust API. Seesmic also oper­ates twhirl, a social desk­top client, that now enables Seesmic video com­ments. twhirl rep­re­sents 12% of Twit­ter mes­sages being sent and has over 400,000 downloads.

Seesmic was founded in Sep­tem­ber 2007 by ser­ial entre­pre­neur, Loic Le Meur. He founded the com­pany in 2007, with the goal of turn­ing online video into a pow­er­ful medium for threaded, inter­ac­tive video con­ver­sa­tions. Loic also served as the Inter­net advi­sor to French Pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy, tak­ing an active role in his cam­paign, help­ing gal­va­nize thou­sands of blog­gers to sup­port the can­di­date. He also serves as an adviser to the World Eco­nomic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

It is backed by Ron Con­way, an early investor in Google and Pay­Pal, and Euro­pean entre­pre­neurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, respon­si­ble for Kazaa, Skype and inter­net TV com­pany Joost.

For tak­ing social net­work­ing a step fur­ther and for show­ing us a por­tent of things to come, Ang Pere­grino Rec­om­mends Seesmic this week.