12seconds.tv

» see 12seconds.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

video status updates in 2008 needed a phone i did not own yet. that is the honest first thing about 12seconds.tv. the pitch was clean, a twitter where the post was a short video instead of a line of text, capped at twelve seconds so nobody had to sit through anything. but in 2008 the camera in most pockets, mine included, was not the thing you casually filmed your life with. so this one i watched from the outside, and mostly late.

this is told from a distance. it came out of santa cruz, california, a small team with sol lipman as the name that stuck to it. it launched in 2008 and its whole growth plan was twitter. you recorded a clip, and the service pushed it out to your twitter followers the same way a tweet went out.

that link to twitter was the engine and, later, the trap. for a couple of years it had a loyal early-adopter crowd, the people who tried every new social toy the moment it appeared. the trouble was that the crowd never got much bigger than that. the traffic in 2010 looked about like the traffic in 2008.

~ the dossier ~

~ the postmortem ~

two things closed in on it at once. really though, hosting video costs money in a way hosting text never did, and a flat userbase does not pay those bills. at the same time twitter spent 2010 tightening the rules for the apps built on top of it, cutting off the easy ride that services like this one had taken for granted. the founders read the room and did not pretend.

they announced the date in advance and kept it. 12seconds.tv went dark on october 22 2010 at 8:15 in the evening, pacific time. a clean, stated shutdown, which was more grace than most of these got.

~ what it became ~

the funny part is the idea was not wrong, just early. in those days. a few years later vine did almost exactly this, six-second looping video posted to a social feed, and for a while vine was enormous. by then the phones had caught up and the cameras were good and always in hand. 12seconds had the shape of the thing before the hardware could carry it. it lost, and the same bet won for someone else once the world was ready.

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