12 Seconds

I’ve seen a few folks tweeting lately with a “12seconds” preface (followed by a link). I haven’t clicked on any before because (usually) there isn’t much in a 12seconds tweet other than a link — I need a little more incentive to click on a link in a random tweet. Anyway, my click today took me to a site where people post short 12 second videos of themselves.

If you’ve been reading this weblog for any amount of time at all, you know I tend to ramble on and on. I’ve semi-recently started using Twitter and I find it very interesting (because I’m limited to 140 characters — it’s not so easy for me to confine myself to that amount of space, but I find it works well for some topics (more newsy)).

The 12 second videos seem to be the video equivalent of a tweet. It’s an interesting space. I don’t know if anyone else is doing it (most of the stuff on YouTube is longer (and not that interesting to me)). I know Flickr has recently introduced short videos, but I’m not sure they’re tackling the same space. It seems like 12 Seconds is much more intentionally trying to be a video Twitter, whereas Flickr is just adding short videos as a (cool) afterthought.

I have to admit I’m more of a printed text boy. I don’t follow podcasts and I don’t look at YouTube very often. Yes, I listen to music, but when I want to digest something in a form other than music, I prefer to read about it. Tweets work well for me for this reason, but I’m not sure 12 second videos would. Still, there is something about it that interests me. I’ve signed up to get an invite (I have no idea how long this will take).

I don’t know what I’d be able to do with 12 seconds since I’m a rather slow thinker, but it might be fun to try. If I do give it a shot, I’ll post something here with a link. Perhaps I’m interested, in part, because of the strict time limitation. It seems like a spontaneous haiku… a stream of consciousness haiku? I guess it would be possible to give a great deal of thought to your 12 seconds and to produce a very polished video (some folks on the site seem to be doing this). I don’t think that’s how I’d use it though.

Though I’m not really that interested in video blogging, I might give it a try if/when I get an invite. Unrelated, I find the whole “invite” thing interesting (psychologically speaking), but that’s probably fodder for another post.

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