12seconds.tv is closing :(

Its always sad when someone, excited about an idea tries to nurture it, but doesn’t work out in the end. What’s even sadder is when you’ve built a community, and they will lose another form of communication and another way to keep their memories with them. A couple of examples that I can think at the top of my head, like Geocities, yahoo galleries, There.com, ecircles (anyone remember that?) just to name a few.

And in a couple of days, 12seconds.tv will be closing its doors.

How shall I describe 12seconds? I guess its kind of like twitter, but instead of texts, it uses a short video. And you can ramble about anything you like, and its fine because well, its just 12 seconds and you don’t feel like you’ve wasted too much time

I joined 12seconds a couple of years back when Jerrick recommended me to join. What? Another site to leave a digital footprint on? Ah well, lets give it a try then! And this was my first video back in November 2008 :

Yeah, I was pretty confused. What the heck is this 12seconds?

But I still remember the moment recording it. I was just back from my yoga session and sitting in my old room in Singapore. There were loads of decorated boxes around me, personally handmade by me for the upcoming wedding ceremony in about a month time. There’s even a gluegun on top of my touchsmart computer that was to be shipped to Italy!

And seeing all that just made me reminisce, man.

One of the things that I quite like 12seconds is mainly because I could upload anything I wanted by webcam, uploading from a camera or from the mobile phone. And it could probably be just me, but the people were civil and unjudgemental, so we were all feel free to be silly and we didn’t really care. Indeed, I’ve never seen any flamings at all!

At the beginning of this year, I tried to be a little more active in participating. And like foursquare, 12seconds had a ladder that when you reach it, you get a badge. These are some of the badges that I’ve unlocked. I tried to unlock the consequence video badge. I almost reached the 48 days, but I missed one day and went back to zero and I just couldnt be bothered to continue anymore

But one of the easiest way to get a badge was to post videos regularly and it wasnt difficult to do, especially when they have daily challenge questions. The site will pose a question, and you give your response and if other viewers liked it, they could vote for you. It was actually quite fun to participate.

And while you could think of and upload videos with topics you want to talk about, its nice to have this 12erator which generates interesting questions too in case you cannot think of anything. Many of them make pretty good blog topics even … and here are a couple of them :

How about … “Hi!” :p

Actually pick up lines doesnt really work for a woman, I dont believe there is a magic word that works for everyone. Why not just talk to her and try to get to know her better?

Oh this is a simple one. I dont ever want to meet a Cthulhu. Not even the cartoon version.

On long flights, I’d be quite achy from sitting down and being squeezed in economy so, I’d usually change movements like squatting on my chair or try interesting and new yoga poses

And one of the things that I appreciated from 12seconds what that it allowed embedded videos that can be viewed directly on my site. And I’ve been using that on my sidebar to replace my rss image widget update from my posterous. It worked for a while, but since December 2009, it just stopped working. Meh.

Videos are better anyway!

But what a shame that all of these wont last because 12seconds is closing on this friday, the 22nd November. I’m in seesmic at the moment, but its just not the same!

12seconds.tv, its been fun and thank you for all the memories. Take care and best of luck, Sol Lipman and David Beach

Sidenote : By the way, did anyone realise that today is 20102010? :p