Because you asked for it (right?): Disqus and Seesmic team up for video comments

Venture Beat — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:23:17 -0400

Updated

There’s another company jumping on the video comments bandwagon. Disqus, the startup whose system powers comments for more than 13,000 blogs (including VentureBeat), is adding video through a partnership with Seesmic.

You can see the system at work on Fred Wilson’s blog. There aren’t any particularly fancy or groundbreaking features yet — Disqus’ Daniel Ha (no relation to the writer of this post) says the company wanted to keep things fairly straightforward so it would be “as seamless as possible to go from text to video” and not scare users away.

Fair enough, but do people actually want to leave video comments? TechCrunch has had video comments for a while, but they don’t seem to get much use. Wilson’s firm Union Square Ventures is an investor in Disqus, yet his post — which begins, “First, let me say I am not sure about the utility of video comments” — doesn’t sound completely sold on the idea either.

Ha, however, says that video commenting can take off if it’s marketed to people in the right way, which hasn’t happened yet. This announcement sounds like a small step in a bigger push toward more adoption.

“This new release is admittedly for the early adopter crowd,” Ha says. “We want to get a feel for how they would be using this and their willingness to let go of old standards.”

I’m not convinced yet — it seems like simple text-based comments are just so much easier and more effective. But then, I’m an old-fashioned text guy myself. We’ll keep watching; maybe people will start using the video system for interesting ends.

The new service, which Mashable broke last week, could at least lead to a higher profile for relatively unproven video company Seesmic.

Update: And now you’ll get to see the new feature in action on VentureBeat — we’ve enabled video comments. Have at it!

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Because you asked for it (right?): Disqus and Seesmic team up for video comments