Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

12seconds just today launched their application programming interface (API) as well as announced it’s first three partners: Tweetdeck, Blippr, and Phreadz. With the goal of 12seconds being to be the go-to platform for video status updates, they needed this step forward of a strong API.

The company is happy with their first three partners, although they are still encouraging others to hop in and play around with the code. Of their newest partners, Tweetdeck, an Adobe Air client, probably holds the crown for being known for it’s Twitter service. Blippr is a site that does short-form reviews, and Phreadz is a startup company that does threaded video conversations.

For those not familiar with 12seconds, an easy way to describe it would be to compare it to the micro-messaging site Twitter…just in video format.  The 12 seconds part? Just what is sounds like. The video messages can’t be any longer, or shorter than 12 seconds. Yeah. Makes for some interesting and amusing video blurbs. I talked to David Speiser from the 12seconds website and asked him why they decided to go with 12 seconds. I mean…why not 10 seconds? Or whatever? He told me that;

“Regarding, the timing, (why 12?) there are a lot of reasons.  We spent some time playing with different numbers timing.  Ten seconds is actually a little too short - oftentimes we saw people needing a second or two to mentally prepare, or not realizing that recording had started.  15 seconds is a little too long - lots of testers said they were getting bored.  And twelve is kind of like us.  A little different.  :)  We march to our own crazy drummers, and we liked twelve.  It felt distinctive, and it’s fun.”

I also asked him if they had any new partnerships in the works since they just announced their first three. Speiser responded that “we have many partnership discussions ongoing, with a wide variety of different companies and services.  Our goal is to be the platform for video status, and any service that might benefit from a short form, video status update mechanism is a service we’re interested in working with and supporting.”

The folks over at 12seconds have been having fun with the whole 12 second limit thing. They started up a 12second challenge, where each day a question or task is posed to their users. All of the 12seconds responses are then put together on a single page. Although they are still in invite mode, you can request an invitation by submitting your email address here.  I was told that when they’ve added some new features and learned more about how to scale (and how not to scale) they’ll move into Beta and remove the invite only restriction.  “Timing is still unclear, but it should be in the near future.”

While 12seconds is a fun program, whether or not they hit their rather lofty goal of being the “go-to platform” I guess only time will tell.  But, as fun as it is, I’m pretty dang sure it’s gonna take them a tad longer than 12 seconds to get there.

Read [CNet]