The Telegraph newspaper reported yesterday that Twitter is considering the addition of live video tweeting saying: ”The upgrade, which is being discussed by Twitter’s founders, will enable Twitter users to upload brief video snippets to their profiles directly from mobile phones, laptops and other devices.” Not true so it seems. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone answered in a mail to Mashable saying that they won’t be doing video hosting: “140 characters of text including spaces. You know the drill!” Not all that unlogical since Twitter has no intention in duplicating the functionality of existing apps because this could undermine the trust of developers who invest time, money and energy in creating applications for the Twitter ecosystem.
So if Twitter is not developing it, what applications should you use? There are two services that jump out. Seesmic and 12seconds.tv. Seesmic is often considered to be ‘the’ video Twitter, but 12seconds.tv is probably the best option probably because it has the same idea behind it: on Twitter, you have 140 characters to make it clear what you want to say, on 12seconds.tv, you have exactly 12 seconds. That’s a lot shorter (and to the point) than Seesmic which gives you a full 10 minutes to rant. The startup was founded by David Beach and Sol Lipman in January 2008.
So how can 12 seconds count toward music you’ll say? It’s an excellent tool for bands wanting to communicate short studio messages to their Twitter followers. Twitter is not a medium to use to spread long videos, the attention span is remarkably short, so messages need to be kept short and to the point.
