After Its 12 Seconds Of Fame, 12seconds.tv Fizzles Out

Video micro-messaging is hard. Remember when Seesmic was supposed to be the Twitter of video before it mothballed that idea and morphed into a family of realtime streaming apps instead? Now 12seconds.tv, which launched in 2008 with the simple idea of leaving short, public, 12-second video messages for people on the Web, is calling it quits.

The team tried to pivot, introducing an early video messaging iPhone app tied to Twitter, which prefaced Apple’s own FaceTime, but was asynchronous. It never really caught on. It took Apple, with its marketing muscle and deep device integration, to make video messaging cool. And even now I’m not sure how many people really want to make video phone calls.

The 12seconds.tv team has already found new jobs at AOL (welcome!) and eBay. Something tells me we’ll be hearing from them again soon.

For those of you who uploaded videos to 12seconds.tv, a download tool will be made available later this week.