You've got 12 seconds. What do you say? How fast do you talk? Can you solve the meaning of life? There's a new web kid on the block, and it gives you, yep, 12 seconds to film your bit. And it's called? 12seconds.
It's just like a video twitter, and currently appears as a site with a grid of videos, shot by the lucky invited, each no longer than 12 seconds. Titles that appear as you roll over the videos gives you an idea as to what each is about.
There's a man who records his 12 seconds in the nude, a guy determined not to speak in his vids and the omnipotent Veronica Belmont. Oh, and it's got a buzzword - microvideoblogging.
But will it catch on?
It's been compared so far with services like Seesmic. But where Seesmic is like a video message board, with people entering into conversations and swapping ideas, 12seconds is more like Twitter. And that's no bad thing.
Seesmic is great in theory, but I find I never get more than halfway through a video - people umm and argh, and take forever to get to the point, and then when they do, it's almost always a disappointment. 12seconds doesn't yet have the same conversational element (it's early days) but you can be safe in the knowledge you'll only lose 12 seconds of your life per lame post.
Comparing it to Twitter raises some differences though. Twitter works for me because I can dip in and out, reading them as I'm on the phone (yeah, if I sound like I'm not listening to what you're saying, it's because I'm probably not), checking them in a queue on my phone and generally not engaging that closely. You've got to give all of your attention to videos, so it doesn't offer the same 'one eye on it whilst you're doing something else' experience. Suddenly, 12 seconds becomes a really long time.
It also takes a certain type of person to feel comfortable with filming their inner most thoughts - sitting in front of a video camera requires more lipstick than sitting in front of a keyboard.
So will it catch on? Well, a criticism levelled against it so far has been that it's not useful. But I'd maintain that Twitter is 99% not useful. Yes, occasionally you'll get a lead on a story, and sometimes you'll get the answer to a burning question you pose, but mostly, it's people telling you about what they've had for lunch. Amusing, but not the most useful of knowledge.
It's also still on strict invite only, so perhaps we'll have to wait another couple of months to determine whether or not it's going to fly. In the meantime, you can check out what the lucky few are saying here.
Susi Weaser is the editor of Shiny Shiny and has her name on the invite list.
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