Social mobile video startup Socialcam is rolling out a new website today, which is designed to create more engagement for users that might not have the mobile app installed. The company has also introduced a leaderboard to help highlight users to celebrities, brands and top producers on the Socialcam platform.
For Socialcam, the new release is all about community, according to CEO Michael Seibel. In the website’s left column, Socialcam shows off all the videos from users that you follow, as well as likes and comments that follow. And in the right column, Socialcam hopes to introduce you to new users that you don’t yet follow, as well as showing your activity and what your friends are up to. The idea is to replicate a lot of the features that are available in Socialcam’s mobile app on the web.
In addition, Socialcam is hoping to highlight some of its most popular users by releasing a leaderboard. Doing so will show off some of the celebrities and non-celebrities who have developed followings through the platform. Not surprisingly, Britney Spears is the #1 user on the platform, but she’s only produced one video. MC Hammer, Floyd Mayweather, and Lupe Fiasco are among other celebs with huge followings.
A lot of people like to call Socialcam the “Instagram for Video,” but Seibel hates the comparison. “The two companies have very different challenges,” he wrote in an email. Also, he believes that social video apps are all about getting people out of the mindset that video is only for consumption, and “creating a new media creation trend by unlocking the video camera on your phone.”
The average video length is about 60-80 seconds, compared with the maximum 15 seconds allowable through competitor Viddy — and the 2-5 minutes that is standard for user-generated YouTube videos. Users also spend a lot of time playing with filters and effects before uploading videos onto the platform. On average, they check out eight different effects on each video before publishing.
In addition to the major revamp being released today, Socialcam has also rolled out a series of changes to the way its social tools work, mainly to ensure that users are aware of what they are sharing through the site and the app’s Open Graph integration.
“We want people to understand exactly what it means to have social mode on and exactly what it does, so you always know what’s going on,” Seibel told me by phone. That addition comes after both Socialcam and Viddy have received some criticism for being “spammy” in users’ news feeds on Facebook. Thanks to Open Graph integration, Socialcam has added a ton of new users, but some of them might have inadvertently been added as a result of watching videos from services like YouTube that were ingested into Socialcam’s platform, rather than user-submitted videos from the startup’s mobile app.