Growing Pains for Online Video Chat

Seesmic, TokBox, and other startups in this area of social media must contend with issues of personality and, especially, privacy

By Max Zeledon

Turns out, even the most outgoing social media animals get shy once in a while. Tom Sparks can be found just about everywhere on the social Web, with profiles on Twitter, Blip.fm, Tumblr, Flickr (YHOO), Delicious, Last.fm, and more. He aggressively pursues every online chance to find interesting connections and experiences. When he had the chance to try new Web-based video chat tools, Sparks signed up with Seesmic. While it was still in a very early "alpha" test stage, Sparks recorded conversations regularly and responded quickly to other people's videos.

Then something strange happened. Unlike with other social networks, Sparks soon found himself feeling uneasy about the lack of privacy and the pressure to perform. Sure, social media mavens have to produce pithy and useful tweets on Twitter and post attractive photos and witty status updates on Facebook. But it's another thing entirely to speak in front of a Webcam while potentially thousands of strangers watch, judging your looks, delivery, and every gesture. "They cause performance anxiety," Sparks says of video chat sites. "It takes an extrovert personality to be able to do it consistently, and I got tired of it.…My interest fizzled." As blogger Robert Scoble once told me, "You have to be outrageous and over the top." Most people don't have his gargantuan ego.

Ultimately, a good social app is driven by a strong sense of accessibility, simplicity of use, and even privacy. Otherwise users get turned off. That's what happened to Seesmic; it had a hard time retaining early adopters and didn't grow beyond a core user base. Seesmic peaked at 150,000 monthly unique visitors in October 2008 before dropping to its current level of 92,000. Another startup, 12 Seconds, was heralded by tech pundits as the Twitter of video but suffered a similar fate. It's now nothing more than a micro social video community.

Loss of Control

What went wrong? Startups are essentially experiments—works in progress where assumptions are tested on a daily basis. In Seesmic's case, the assumption was that people would be excited to use video. They may be in the future, but not now. People can control their tweets and Facebook posts. Not so with video, says UCLA Internet historian and social media expert Brad Fidler. "Putting yourself on video is a major thing," Fidler says. "Most people don't want their faces on video when they don't get to control their own content." Seesmic users had a greater sense of security when the site was in test mode, he explains. "It was protected and everyone got to know each other and they felt safe," Fidler says. "Once Seesmic went public, that was not there anymore."

We give up some anonymity when we use the social Web, but many people aren't willing to give it up quite so completely. "Anonymity allows greater freedom because there are things you don't want your employer or family to know about," says Amanda Lenhart, an analyst at the the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "People have public and private personalities, and video sites take that away." On Facebook, for instance, users still control the content and how it's used, tagged, and distributed. "With text and photos we can create an image we like and want to present to the outside world, but video makes that difficult to accomplish," Lenhart says. "The way you come across on video also depends on the quality—the ambient light and how you display yourself."

Video also lends itself to more extroverted personalities, Lenhart says. "It also includes your voice and mannerism and this requires a bold personality," she notes. "Not everyone is charismatic enough to pull it off and most people have limits as to what they want to expose in public." This is evident on both Seesmic and 12 Seconds, where certain individuals dominate the public conversation.

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