Rupert Howe started a conversation on the videoblogging list the other day about a post Clintus McGintus made on his blog called The Videoblogger is Dead.
In the discussions on the list and on Clintus’s blog there is (among some people) a disappointment that videoblogging hasn’t turned out to be the rewarding social experience it once promised to be.
In 2005-2006, when web video was just starting to get easy to do I was very interested in what it would mean for how people would communicate with one another, and how online video would become a social medium. In fact, that was what my ITP final thesis project was about – the creation of short videos (recorded on a phone and sent to the web) to communicate with groups of friends. What I imagined was something like video twitter – short messages in video form sent to groups of friends.
Another ITP student, and a friend of mine, Eric Fino, worked on a thesis project that suggested a social tool for use when watching videos. People could watch a video together online and chat about it. It was a great project.
Four years later it turns out that Fino was right, and I was wrong. The ways in which people are social with video are all about the watching. In fact, while everyone was saying how TV was about to die, the real-time web came along with Twitter and made scheduled video that is piped into almost every house compelling again.
When I worked on my thesis I concentrated on how people would create and post video and not so much on how they would see it talk about it – how the message would be sent, rather than how it would be received. What I had worked out by the end of that project was that in order for video to be social you needed to make it easier to engage with it socially, not just easier to put it up there in the first place.
Sites like 12seconds.tv and seesmic are working on the watching and talking. I think that’s where things are going to get really interesting – when someone finally gets it right, truly social video is going to have a big impact on the ways in which we connect to one another.
I think the effort needs to go into the watchers. For all the talk of “the people formerly known as the audience”, they are often just assumed to be there, full suite of media tools at the ready, just dying to get involved. In fact their involvement doesn’t require media tools, it requires online video tools that lend themselves easily to rich social interactions. Of which, more later.
