Last night, as promised, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur shared his proposed business plan for Seesmic moving forward. Topics ranged from monetization techniques to mobile application support.
See below for some of the key points from the conversation. This is not the full conversation as lots of information was exchanged between Loic and the community members. You can see the majority of the conversation in the video at the end of this post. Also, Seesmic just launched a mobile app for Nokia N95 users. Check that out here and in the video below.
Question – How will Seesmic create revenue down the road?
Loic – There are three types of revenue streams.
First, there will be advertisements in Seesmic. There is no point in having them right now, as it is still too early. They will not be intrusive. I hate intrusive advertising. We will be happy to discuss with you how to make the ads as unobtrusive as possible. Also, the ads may be tied into what you are interested in. For example, if you like running you can have an ad for new Nike shoes.
The second model will be a paid subscription for a pro version of the site that will contain more advanced features. It would be very similar to how Flickr charges more for additional statistics. We will always have a very complete free version. I want to reassure you on this. We may add features which will be new and which will be more advanced and reserved for a pro version. I have some ideas on that and I would love your input.
Third, we will be working with enterprises, brands and universities to make Seesmic a platform for professional conversations. We have had a player with the X-Files brand and we got 1,500 replies in that. That is probably going to be the most important one as far as the business model. Soon you will see us moving into this direction.
Question – what is the future direction of the site and its technology?
Loic - We are a platform for conversation through video. We started this space because nobody had thread video this way before. The vision is simple. All the blogs, Facebook and social software tools I enjoy didn’t have video. I have been blogging since 2003 and I was frustrated to be talking to all my fiends and not seeing them or knowing them better. That’s the vision of Seesmic - to be as close as possible to real life. We are no Second Life – we are real life. We look like we really are.
Actually, we make people look worse than they really are haha. We are a platform. We will be a destination site for conversation and video. We already are. We enable that conversation in many other places. For example our mobile platform, for which we are going to release a new tool tomorrow. We added a blog player for going through a thread and video comments. Those video comments do not appear on the public timeline anymore. As many videos as there are on Seesmic, there are just as many that you do not see. We see them internally because they are coming in as a platform.
We will launch a Facebook app soon and integrate with other big social software. We have Twhirl integration now and that is great.
It is all about experimenting. Failing and starting again - hopefully not entire as a company. The content in the way we have done it is not a failure. Sukhjit and Rachel have done an amazing job and I have said this and twittered and can’t say more. It was successful but what we wanted to do here was to focus not on creating content but on enabling everybody to have great conversation while not creating it ourselves for you.
If you remember, we have tons of videos of people saying they didn’t want those shows when we launched them - when we launched Newspop and when we lunched Unboxing. This was said because people said Seesmic is a tool and we should let people have conversation; help it but not create them artificially.
It is like if twitter starting putting conversation in twitter to feed the beast. It is like if on Facebook we started creating conversation by people being paid to talk. We tired and it was successful but we want to focus on helping you create content and conversation and not doing it ourselves. We got tons of criticism from doing it because it is very different from having users doing it. Again, no criticism against Rachel and Sukhjit who have done a great job.
We thought in order to keep going in this direction (which may happen outside of Seesmic by you) is something that would have required a lot of investment, editing and skills as well as a lot of resources which we don’t have. We want to focus on the tool itself and not the technology.
Question – Will the public timeline eventually be phased out or will it always be there?
Loic - I don’t know where this idea of not having a public timeline is coming from. I am going to sum up the question. There is, and always will be, a way to access the public videos in Seesmic to find new friends and conversation. I don’t know why people are wondering about that but it is good and I will address it.
There will soon be groups and when groups are realized, everyone will have their own Seesmic. You can create you own groups and have people join to have conversations within those groups. You can also select privacy so that nobody can see outside of the group what you decided to talk about. For example, you can create a group Loic sucks and discuss things about how bad I suck and keep it private so that I don’t see it. How about that?
Question – What about the content creation talent still employed by Seesmic. Do they have a place in the new vision of the site?
Loic - If there are people in the company in content creation we still have… by the way, just to break from this, do you realize how much transparency you are asking? I mean, seriously, do you know any company with this much transparency. I’m not sending myself flowers, but I want you to understand that you are asking me to explain how many people on the team are doing this or that, you are asking me what are they doing and why. It is very interesting you know? I wonder where this transparency will go. I started like this last year and so I am happy to go to a certain point…
…So to answer your question, yes, we will be keeping them on board. We will continue to crate informational videos. Such as the one you can see on Welcome to Seesmic. We had lots of positive feedback and ideas. For example, how to use Seesmic if you are shy or look like me and are bald haha.
The most important thing is we will make you, if you want, do better shows. We are not saying there will not be shows we will help you do those . You have a video profile and are a regular user, we want it to be amazing, edited and great. We would love our top members to have better profiles. You need resources. We will not have dedicated people starting conversations that is the big difference. Unless you decide on a topic, there will not be someone full time starting conversations. I have not said enough that Sukhjit and Rachel were amazing doing this; we have just deiced to focus on having you do this yourself. I hope this is clear and I am happy to answer more.
Oh, and will employees be allowed to post on seismic or will we be like YouTube and not allow it? Sure they can do as many videos as they like as long as it is not company inappropriate or company information… and now back to the transparency issue. What is comp proprietary information? I have some ideas on this. I would like them to be talking about anything else but the company on Seesmic if it is possible (with the exception of Thomas who is there to help people use Seesmic). It is risky to have company doing videos commenting on business model about the company, if you see what I mean. They will be on seismic and will have fun with you as the best way to learn how to make this better is to be on Seesmic, but not to be paid full time to create conversations do you see the difference?
Question: What about mobile support?
Loic – I love mobile. An iPhone video app is in the works. We want to get it right but we will have iPhone support. Remember, it does not support recording so far unless it is hacked – jailbroken.. so it is coming. However, you can check the great iPhone browsing page (http://labs.searchmic.com/iphone - must be opened on your iPhone to work) that Seesmic user Tiil and his team have built so you can view posts on your iPhone.
We need to change and update the API, the recording API. It will help all the developers build recording into applications with library.
Question: What about the bugs? What is being done about these issues?
Loic - We have another version of Seesmic and we fixed big bugs. We are preparing the new Seesmic which is coming. I’m playing with it and we are concentrating on this because the resources of the team are not very big so we are focusing more on the new release than the current version. You will really like the new one.
Question: Will we be able to export our content?
Loic - Seesmic wants to help you create content and export it. Right now, you can easily create but not easily export. You can go to feeds and export. We are making this compatible with iTunes and you will be able to export easily because the data is yours so we will help in reposting to YouTube… why not…other platforms as well.
The full conversation thread
Nokia N95 Seesmic client thread
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