140Char

So far, much of the focus on microblogging has been on text, with the one major exception of Seesmic. But using Seesmic as a producer requires a certain amount of effort. It also lends itself to video blog type discussions.

Hence interest around the private alpha launch of 12 Seconds, limiting video uploads in the same manner as Twitter and Plurk et al limit the amount of text.

Updates are by webcam or mobile phone, and there’s no scientific reasoning disclosed behind the 12 second limit, although apparently “Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.”

What is also quite interesting is that the people behind 12 Seconds are open about: “The more we can get 12seconds off of the 12seconds.tv site the better. We are building a platform for video status. We want these clips to be anywhere you are, or at least anywhere you want them to be.” So widgets are already available for Myspace and blogs, and more distribution is doubtless on the way…

It’s worth taking a look to see how much information can be conveyed in 12 seconds via video. My only question about the service is that it successfully replicates the upload portion of microblogging - but are there mechanisms for replying to people, and forming groups? Those are the things that have driven Twitter, Friendfeed and all the famous social networks. If I see 12 seconds that are worthy of praise, comment or argument, I want to be able to respond directly via the service - not have to track people down by alternative means.

Take a look at the site, and share your thoughts below…

One of the great things about the current web revolution is that as soon as a website/application appears, someone clever figures out ways to tweak it to improve on it for their needs.

And so, as many people are discovering Plurk, TwisterMC aka Thomas McMahon, has already created a sidebar plugin for Firefox 2 and 3, to use the simplified mobile version of Plurk.

It comes with the Plurk logo of a headless ‘thing’ and a keyboard shortcut. The actual functionality of the sidebar is down to Plurk, and it’s being download right now for a test.

I’ve seen a couple of rumours that Plurk’s creators are too keen on third party applications being developed - perhaps down to Twitter’s downtime problems and the fact 90% of requests to Twitters database comes from external applications. But we’ll see…

Dan Thornton on Plurk.

Julius Solaris on Plurk

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