TwitVid

» see twitvid.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

twitvid sat one step over from where i was on twitter. i had a small turkish-language account in the 2010-2012 window that i used mostly to follow tech news, and video on twitter still meant either a youtube link or a twitpic screengrab. twitvid was where the celebrities and gadget bloggers were hosting their phone clips.

the founder was mo al adham. the service launched in may 2009 from a small us team as the video-shaped answer to what twitpic was already doing for photos. upload a mobile clip and drop the returned short link into a tweet. viewers hit a hosted player from there. twitpic-for-video, with the same twitter-adjacent metadata and the same clean two-step publishing loop.

by 2011 twitvid had raised six and a half million dollars in a series b led by azure capital with draper fisher jurvetson coming along, and it was carrying tens of millions of hosted clips. then twitter shipped its own native video pipeline and the whole third-party-video-host category thinned out over the following year.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the value was in the seam between the browser and the phone. by 2009 recording a decent thirty-second clip on an iphone was easy. hosting it somewhere that would return a twitter-friendly short link and a mobile-playable embed was not. twitvid closed that gap for three years. the site handled the mobile upload plus the transcode and returned a twitter-ready short link at the end. celebrities used it heavily. so did the gadget-blog crowd who wanted their clips to auto-preview inside the tweetdeck column.

~ the rebrand ~

on 13 june 2012 the company announced telly. same team, same office, but instead of being a video host that fed twitter, telly wanted to be a video discovery product across the whole web. it aggregated clips from bigger networks like youtube and layered personal recommendation on top. the twitvid brand went into maintenance mode overnight. mo al adham said in the announcement that the twitvid library of ten million clips would carry over.

the pivot was correct in direction. twitter would kill the standalone twitter-video-host category in the months after by turning on card-based inline video. what the pivot did not fix was that video discovery in 2012 was already a crowded field with youtube's recommendation engine sitting in the middle of it.

~ the long tail ~

telly kept the lights on for a while. later ownership passed to cinemagics in kuwait, and the entity was renamed mahatat inc. it continued as an arabic-language video app aimed at the middle east. the trace of the original twitvid brand disappeared from the product entirely. what remains is the specific 2009-2012 window when tweeting a video meant reaching for twitvid and almost nothing else.

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