My first 12seconds: Good morning on 12seconds.tv

Since I’m still in withdrawal from having to send back my N95 that got me addicted to Qik, I’ve been squirming like crazy ever since new mobile vlogging service 12seconds.tv went into public alpha yesterday morning. I got my invite today, and immediately fell in love. While Qik is great for interacting with viewers while streaming live events, 12seconds really is an easy, mobile twitter for video. As someone who has interesting content to create but no time to muck around with video editing, 12seconds takes the pressure off even more by only allowing “12 seconds” of content. The brief time limit also has the benefit of removing inhibitions to vlogging, since posters don’t feel intimidated by the need to engage someone’s attention for minutes at a time.

Oh, and you don’t have to have any kind of special software to record video. If you’re using the website, a standard flash application will allow you to record from your webcam. But what’s cool is that when you’re out and about, any Internet enabled cell phone that records video can send your update to a special email address. Everyone can use this.

So even though you only have to be interesting in 12 second bursts now, you still want people to watch these vidlets. You can follow friends within the system and automatically update twitter when you’ve posted a new video, plus there’s pages for all recent and popular videos. Users can leave comments, but there’s no way to reply with your own video (yet, I assume). But 12seconds already understands that the more people use these posts off their site, the happier their users will be and the faster their site will grow. They’ve developed two sizes of blog widgets that you can use now, and one would assume FriendFeed integration is coming soon. I’m trying to pull my 12seconds RSS feed into my recently resumed tumblelog, but not having luck yet…I’m sure I can hack something up. =]

Verdict: There’s definitely room for both Qik and 12seconds, at least in my mobile toolkit.