12seconds.tv a 2008 Failure

I was one of the first people to blog about 12 seconds, but I am not one of the first people to remove the 12seconds widget from my website and give up on the fledgling service.

The last straw for me was when they started displaying some other guy’s video inside my widget on my blog sidebar.  I understand that the service is beta (after an extended public alpha) but if they can’t send the right video to the right website, that’s a little too beta for my use.

12seconds was supposed to be a twitter-like video service that allowed you to post a 12 second update – no more and no less – about what you were doing.

The idea was novel, but the service has suffered from a seemingly stagnant active user base (just look at the recent updates), a massive number of disruptive technical issues, and basic systems that just don’t seem to work quite right.

For example, my wife snapped up one of the alpha invitations I had obtained and signed up in case she ever wanted to use the service. Like other users, she gets the update emails about what is new with the service.  Since she never uses 12seconds, she tried to unsubscribe.  That function doesn’t work either FYI.

12seconds was a great idea with future promise it just isn’t doing it for me and I don’t think its going to catch on.  For every Twitter there are a lot of failures, and 12seconds is unfortunately one of the failures of 2008.