12seconds launches on the new TweetDeck for iPhone
We are super stoked that TweetDeck’s new iPhone app (which launched earlier today) includes video recording supplied by 12seconds. We’ve been working with the fine blokes over at TweetDeck world headquarters for a long time. They have created an amazing application on the Desktop and incredibly ported the same feeling and environment to the iPhone. As iPhone developers ourselves we’re constantly amazed how TweetDeck can do some of the things this app does.
So go download TweetDeck. It’s free and in the app store right now!
You might have noticed there’s a new awesome, amazing, campaign on 12seconds - the Get Crackin’ video contest. This is perfect fodder for the 12seconds crew! Take 12seconds to show you crack a pistachio (with or without an actual pistachio) and be entered to win a Macbook Pro, a Flip Camera as well as a bunch of other super rad prizes. If you haven’t seen the campaign yet, it’s as hilarious as they get. We’ve embedded a sample below.
It’s a huge campaign with lots of stars - like Levi Johnston (aka the dude that got Sarah Palin’s daughter pregnant) and our favorite, Vincent Pastore who played Big Pussy Bonpensiero on the Sopranos. In this campaign you get to be the star because the Wonderful Pistachio people know that social media rocks.
So do it! Get Crackin’ and win a bunch of awesome prizes brought to you by your friends at Wonderul Pistachios and 12seconds.
Today we’re stoked to announce 12cast, the simplest way to get your videos to Twitter using the iPhone 3GS.
It’s free and available on the app store right now, click here.
Login with your Twitter account, tilt the phone to the left and you’re recording! Title your post and your video is on Twitter. Our goal was to make getting a video to Twitter as easy as possible. There’s a new 12cast award in it for you once you run the app too!
A quick note: If you already have a 12seconds account and have not connected your account with Twitter, you’ll want to do that BEFORE you login with 12cast. If the accounts aren’t linked, we won’t know its you and we’ll make a brand new account for you which might cause some confusion. If you’ve already done this and now have two accounts, shoot us an e-mail and we’ll try and work something out for you.
This marks an exciting day for us as this is our first native video iPhone app. It’s just for the iPhone 3GS right now but we’ve got other things up our collective sleeve for the rest of the proletariat. You can look forward to seeing 12seconds release some other innovative apps soon as well as integrating our service with some excellent partners. #12cast Contest!
Our goal is to make sure everyone in the whole world knows about 12cast. So, we’re going to have a contest - anyone who uses the hashtag #12cast in any tweet or 12seconds post will get entered to win iPhone data service for 1 year. For every 12seconds post with #12cast you’ll get entered 3 times. You can enter as many times as you’d like. Don’t have an iPhone? We’ll give you the cold hard cash. Have an iPhone but want the cold hard cash instead? Okay. This contest will end on Friday August 7th at 5PM. We’ll announce the winner on Monday morning.
We need to enlist you to help get this contest started. So, please tweet: #12cast for the iPhone 3GS gets video on Twitter in seconds & could win u a yr of your data plan. http://bit.ly/12cast PLS RT
or, click here and we’ll do all that hard work for you.
Cool community News
Voting on the Challenge: after long debate we have reinstated the challenge voting. It’s just like it used to be - you have 3 votes which you can give to challenge participants. The challenge ends at midnight PST so get all your votes in. We’ve also added a link in the challenge box to allow you to submit challenge suggestions to us! If you’ve got some fun questions to ask everyone, try it out and maybe we’ll use your question!
Have you seen JohnTMeyer’s 12secondtry? He tries something new and fun and challenges you to do the same. It’s like the daily challenge but a bit more physical. Check it out!
Live video chat with the 12seconds team TODAY @ 4 PM Pacific!
We’re opening up our office for some online “office hours” today at 4:00 for a live video chat on UStream. Come hang out with other 12ers, chat with @jakey12 and @thesolster, ask questions and see what’s new at 12seconds HQ. If you’ve got a webcam, we’ll also allow other 12ers to guest host for a few minutes. Just head over to 12second.tv and click the link at the top of the site.
Tomorrow is 12seconds first birthday. What was going on back then?
Did you know that Jacob was actually at Summer Camp? Beach was growing his “funding” beard (he finally had to give up and shave it). and I was so excited that we got on TechCrunch!
Many others (too many to list!) helped launch 12seconds and get it going. Both technically and emotionally, the support we’ve received from our community has made it incredibly worthwhile. We’re still a bunch of bootstrapped upstarts but the site has grown leaps and bounds. For that we thank you. You’ve given us a chance to survive, thrive and build. We’ll be launching products over the next month that will change social video. That’s our promise to you. Synchronize your Twitter and 12seconds Followers
Many 12ers use Twitter and it’s annoying to try and figure out which ones are on 12seconds to follow. So, we’ve created a little synchronization tool that will keep your feed dialed into what your Twitter friends are doing on 12seconds. You’ll notice a button that says “sync” on the left-hand gray sidebar right by “My People.” Click it and all will be right in the world.
Comment with Twitter
We look up to great services like Twitpic and we noticed that they do something magical with comments. From now on, anyone with a Twitter account can comment on any 12seconds video. If that user has connected their Twitter account to 12seconds (most 12ers do) then they’ll get the comment as a “mention” on Twitter!
12ers doing stuff
Check out these guys who are raising awareness about climate change by riding their bike! They’re part of the Trek To Re-Energize America. Good luck to Keysdogg as he travels across the US! Hey, that Mountain Dew promotion last week was awesome - some of us were excited to win.
Normally I wouldn’t do this but given that Loic mentions 12seconds in his Seesmic video post to the community, I thought I’d give some quick feedback on the state of social video. Given that many friends on Twitter and 12seconds have been pinging me about our “flat growth” (as described in the video) it seemed appropriate.
First of all, as a business, it really helps to focus so it isn’t surprising to me that Loic is guiding his team to compete more on the Twitter client side which has seen some real traction. This makes sense to me.
In light of Loic’s video, I wanted to point out two things:
1. The point of Seesmic (the video site) was not to allow people to share video on Twitter and Facebook. It was to have “video conversation.” It turns out the conversation is on Twitter. Video is a component of that conversation - so are other media types. We compete with Seesmic about as much as we compete with Hulu.
2. Our growth is not flat. We launched a year ago and we’ve had great growth. People like using 12seconds and we’re going to keep building our community. We’re pretty content. Social video isn’t easy but it’s worth it.
Social Video is happening all around you!
Whether it’s via 12seconds or some of the awesome competitive services that have come around in the last couple months, social video is becoming more and more mainstream. Twitter is the platform - video is a big part of it. Think about Neda - that was a YouTube video that got passed around by a social network. If Twitter didn’t exist the impact of that video would have been lessened. That’s one use case for social video. There are many more - some, like video conversation might be too early.
While we’re happy with our growth we see great opportunities to continue experimenting with the social video use case. Twitter and Facebook have both been providing companies like 12seconds with so many awesome integration points, you’ll likely see some pretty inventive stuff around social video over the next year.
Personally, I think the most important advancements will be made in the mobile sharing space - specifically in reference to the new iPhone 3GS. Regardless of where the innovation happens I think there are huge opportunities and we’re not going to be shy about going after them.
Hello friends! Sol and Jakey are off to the Big Apple to get extra nerdy at the 140Conf. If you still would like to go we have 50% discounts still available. Hit me up on Twitter.
We’re really excited to invite everyone to join in at the TechKaraoke event on Wednesday night at a place called Pulse. Seems like Pulse is a serious TechKaraoke kind of place and we’re pretty seriously bad at Karaoke (as proven at Jakey’s birthday) so it should be fun. We’ll be supplying some courage juice so show on up and have a round on us.
If you’d like to go hit this link and make yourself known:
Announcing Privacy and Special Deals for the 140Conf!
First of all, did you notice that we redesigned the entire site? Yep, the whole thing. We announced it last week. Check it out.
When’s the last time you took the daily challenge? Every day there’s a new wacky challenge. As a matter of fact, today is: Would You Rather Wednesday (WYRW)! Just click on the daily challenge button in that top action bar for all the fun you could possibly have in 12seconds (or something like that).
Privacy
Ever wanted to make a video and not have it shot out all through the interwebs? You know, one of those special videos that’s really just for your friends and maybe not your co-workers or your mom. At long last we are introducing privacy features to 12seconds. Here’s the way it works:
Private things can only be seen by people that YOU follow and who follow YOU. Other people who follow you, but that you don’t follow back won’t see your private posts
You can choose private or public on the webcam recorder or the uploader
You can indicate “default privacy” in your settings which means that all of your mobile posts, uploads and webcam posts are by default, private (note that this is the only way to keep your mobile posts private)
Private posts don’t tweet and don’t end up in your public timeline (your channel)
YOU can see everything you make in YOUR channel but others will just see your public 12s
All of your current posts are set to public
You can set a public post to private later (just click the editing tool (the pencil icon) in the feed
12ing at the #140Conf in NYC - 50% off conference passes!
We’re excited that next week we’ll be attending the #140Conf in New York with a host of awesome characters. All these Twitter people can be overwhelming so we’re looking for some backup. We purchased a bunch of tickets to the #140Conf and are offering 50% discounts to our 12ers who would like to go. Look, we need all the 12ers we can get at this thing so email Sol right now and reserve your 50% ticket. Need another reason? We’re going to host our first ever New York City 12up! That’s right boys, girls and puppets the first round is on us. We’re still figuring out the details but it’s time for some IRL lovin! We’ll be staying at the Roger Smith Hotel where the noms are righteous. Come join us!
We’re going to try doing the challenge for a while without voting. We used to do it where we picked the winner at around midnight every night so we’re going back to that. It really allowed us to interact with folks more and we miss it. Also, Daily Challenges end/start at midnight starting tonight (the way it used to be). Let us know what you think and bump or comment on a challenge entry if you like it.
Check out the new, improved and awesome 12seconds.tv
Last week we added further Twitter integration and made your feed real-time.
This week we were finally able to finish a redesign that has been a long time in the planning. We think it’s beautiful and hope you do too.
Things that are coming up very soon:
privacy
direct video messaging
new focus on the daily challenge
new focus on awards
brand new community functionality
Confession
We’re still a small company and we’re learning a lot about building community. Over the past several months our traffic has grown considerably as people use 12seconds to share their content on Twitter and Facebook. But, OUR community…well…it hasn’t been as fun as it had been before we got all that traffic (at least for us). So, we’ve decided to put more focus on building community on 12seconds. We want to get back to our roots because for us, the community stuff, the camp-like atmosphere was the most fulfilling.
Mom always said to follow your heart and ours is on 12seconds. Twitter is too noisy now anyway! :)
12seconds is a great place to hang out and make friends. We have a quirky, interesting, sweet, fun, irreverent and caring community. Please join us.
Love,
Team12
PS - Special thanks to Pat who helped us a lot with the redesign. Special love to Beach who managed to do the design while going through some tough times.
- addition of twitter @replies and DMs to your feed - everything on 12seconds is going to happen in real-time (auto-updating) - you can now register using just your Twitter credentials
Okay, what the heck does that all mean? Twitter @replies and DMs into your real-time feed
If you’ve connected your Twitter account to 12seconds then you’ll see your Twitter @replies and DMs appear in your 12seconds feed. From 12seconds you’ll be able to @reply and DM people on twitter using video. Sometimes words aren’t enough - whether you want to give someone the bird or show them your new pair of shoes, 12seconds is here to provide a conversation tool that makes your tweets move.
Also, 12seconds has become real-time. Now when there’s new content for you to see - either from someone you’re following on 12seconds or Twitter conversation, you’ll see a status bar appear letting you know that there’s new content for your consumption pleasure!
Tweet this for us, please…
A couple of weeks ago we added Facebook connect which allows people to register with just their Facebook login. Today, we’re proud to announce the addition of “sign in with Twitter.” Now any Twitter user can utilize 12seconds with just their Twitter login info. Even if you’ve already registered for 12seconds before we suggest you add the “sign in with Twitter” as it is easier for us to manage your Twitter password changes.
Would you mind telling your friends that they can now use 12seconds with just their Twitter login. Tweet This: Add video to your tweets! 12seconds.tv now allows anyone to use 12seconds with just their Twitter login. PLS RT
We so appreciate your support! Go to 12seconds, check out the changes and let us know what you think.
