Over the last few days I have been checking out Seesmic, a new asynchronous video chat utility. At first, I was extremely skeptical about it or it’s usefulness, after all, video chat has been around for a long time and I’ve somehow managed fine without it. (In fact, I avoid it with a passion) The thing is, Seesmic is different. It has potential to be a really powerful form of interactive media.

When Twitter came out, many people where skeptical: after all, how could applying an arbitrary character limit to the messages possibly be a good or useful thing? Turns our it was both good and highly useful. The short messages force you to be brief. Twitter becomes in effect a self-distilled version of your sprawling lifestream. Seemsic has taken a similar tack with it’s service. Rather than allow you to talk one-to-one with another user with full duplex realtime video chat, Seesmic is a asynchronous. You post a short video message and other people can reply with there own. Often, these conversations evolve into longer threads. What makes this so great is the fact that anybody can go back and find out what they missed and jump into the conversation. The threaded approach also handily avoids the sort of anarchy that could occur had Seesmic gone the route of having a video chatroom of sorts with everybody able to talk at once. The process is very self-moderating, and in some regards feels like a better way to have a conversation with a bunch of people than even face to face. Interruption can’t happen, and if you miss a point or a comment someone made, you can go right back and listen again.

In a normal conversation there is always pressure to say something when the other person finishes. With Seesmic, that pressure is not there. If you want to reply, you can take as long as you would like think about what you want to say.
At the same time, having the face-to-face interaction seems to bring out the civility in people. -It removes the anonymity that turns so many people into jerks online.
I can honestly say that watching a video made by a newcomer from South America was the first time I’ve felt the internet truly making me more connected to the rest of humanity in any meaningful way. Seesmic is the first time I’ve felt the internet actually deliver on the emotional claim that it can bring people together and make them feel a greater sense of humanity. The intellectual claims made about the internet have all mostly come true, free access to information, increased connectivity to the word, but from my human and highly biased perspective, Seesmic creates an environment where I no longer have to remind myself that on the other side of my screen, connected by miles of internet backbone, there are other human beings looking back at me.
The Future

Seesmic has gotten me thinking about where a service like this could go in the future, and I believe it has really great potential.
Here are some possibilities:

-Collaborative Art
I’d love to see a group of talented people create characters and act out a free form storyline with each other on Seesmic or a service like it. One person starts, and then somebody jumps in in reply. It would be fascinating to see the story and characters evolve.

-Speech-to-text
The one downside to Seesmic is that when you are catching up on a long thread, you don’t need the nuances of full video, you just want to get a recap of the basic thoughts-text to speech would be great for that.

-Savable or Bookmarkable Threads
There are some segments of conversation on Seesmic that are downright profound, entertaining and funny. As the service grows, having a way to save and share those thread sections in a personal ‘best of’ tab would be phenomenal.

I’d love to hear you thoughts on Seesmic: where do you think it may be going in the future? Do you see it as a useful service?