Socialcam 2.0 Lands on The iPhone

Back in Feburary we took an in-depth look at Socialcam, the mobile video app for iPhone and Android that was built by Justin.tv. The app is easiest to describe as an ‘Instagram for video’ — fire it up and you’ll see a stream of videos recently recorded by your friends. And when you record a video, it’s very easy to quickly tag your friends using Facebook Connect.

Since launching in March (just in time for SXSW), the app has racked up over 250,000 downloads in its first month, 75% of which were on iOS devices. And today they’re launching an update to the app (iPhone only for now, with Android’s update coming) that makes some nice tweaks. I sat down with Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel and President Justin Kan, who walked me through some of changes. You can download the update right here.

The first addition is the ability to save videos recorded using the app to your iPhone’s library (before now you couldn’t save these videos locally). Second, and perhaps most important, is the ability to now upload videos that you’ve already saved in your iPhone’s library, which means you can record video using other apps (say, one that adds a vintage effect), and then share it with your friends using Socialcam.

Because Socialcam is all about making it easy to quickly share these videos with friends, there are now more services you can syndicate to (the full list includes Posterous, Tumblr, Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and SMS). And, finally, the upload flow itself has been streamlined. Seibel and Kan say that the original upload process was overly complex — after recording a video you’d be asked to add a message describing a video, which was a hassle. Now the flow requires fewer taps, and makes it clear that this added descriptive information is optional.

Seibel and Kan also had some stats to share. The most impressive one: 10% of the people who are tagged in videos via Facebook Connect but aren’t already Socialcam users wind up joining the service. And they say that the average video is shared 1.3 times. As for what people are actually recording, the team says that they’re seeing “lots of pets and babies”.