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Socialcam spun out of Justin.tv last year and managed to attract a lot of users with its ability to easily edit and share videos. The mobile app has generated 16 million downloads on iOS and Android. Socialcam has 55 million active monthly users on Facebook, making it the top Facebook app.

Socialcam’s Facebook success, however, was marred by allegations that it was too aggressive in sharing content using Facebook’s Open Graph and was forcing people to download the app to view videos. Socialcam’s active usage has waned since first exploding in April, but it’s still well ahead of rival Viddy. Both were locked in a race to become the so-called “Instagram of video.”

Autodesk said it would like to use Socialcam’s services to help its professionals and consumers share design ideas and make its existing technology more accessible to users. It plans on investing in the platform to help it scale and create more tools for users.

Socialcam, a Y Combinator graduate, raised a seed round in April from a list of big name investors. But the company has remained small with just four employees. It will join other Autodesk acquisitions like Pixlr, SketchBook in its consumer products group.

With a $60 million exit for Socialcam, it’s unclear if anyone will reap a big windfall in the Instagram of video sweepstakes. Video is still not as easy to shoot or view compared to pictures. That makes it harder to recreate the success of Instagram, which is built around simple sharing of photos.

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Using AppData, which measures the usership of Facebook apps through the Facebook API, we determined “stickiness” for a handful of popular apps. Stickiness is the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users—or, the percentage of monthly users that use the app every day. It’s an excellent way to gauge an app’s popularity. We compared some competing apps that users mainly access through Facebook — Viddy and Socialcam, for example, and Draw Something vs. Words with Friends — to see which have higher user engagement. Here are the results.

Viddy vs. Socialcam

Facebook’s recent purchase of photo titan Instagram raises the stakes for the obvious next technology in line: social video. Viddy and Socialcam, both launched over two years ago, are battling for usership, brands and celebrities. With 6,600,000 daily active users and 54,100,000 monthly active users and a stickiness of 12 percent (compared to Viddy’s 1,500,000 DAU, 35,000,000 MAU and 4 percent stickiness) Socialcam is clearly in the lead.

Draw Something vs. Words With Friends

Zynga bought OMGPOP, the maker of Draw Something, in March. Since then, Zynga has started selling prime ad space on the app, and Draw Something’s user engagement has dropped to a still very respectable 25 percent. But not nearly as respectable as Words With Friends, which is at 40 percent — so that means, almost half of its monthly active Facebook users are spreading their words daily.

CityVille vs. FarmVille vs. CastleVille

Zynga has been making some big moves lately. This month, it joined with American Express for a Zynga Serve Rewards card, which offers users Zynga Farm Cash as opposed to more traditional rewards like actual cash or air travel.  Zynga also hired a Washington lobbyist firm to effect change in the real world as well. In its popular “ville” series of games,  CastleVille leads the pack when it comes to user engagement.

Readers: What other app pairs should we compare?

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Well, it seems the party has come to an end. The reality check is eerily reminiscent of the decline in attention for social news-reader applications. AppData.com statistics show a sharp decline in the number of daily active users of these services.

In my post yesterday, Facebook giveth & Facebook taketh: A curious case of video apps, I had pointed out that this was going to be a short-lived bump and the focus for apps cannot be on raw numbers but on retention and usage. That is, and will remain, the hard part of these apps. Finding sustainable growth is not an easy challenge.

As we have pointed out in the past, it is much easier to take and share photos (hence the popularity of Instagram) but capturing, editing and sharing videos is not as easy. Viddy, one of the social video creation and sharing apps, is betting that its roster of celebrity investors and friends would give the company a much needed jump start. Today, Justin Beiber signed up for Viddy and has been sharing his videos.

Socialcam, which had been injecting YouTube videos and sharing them through its player, is now going to have to find new and novel ways to share. The company made some changes today that are less spammy and address many of the issues I had brought up in my post yesterday.

Michael Seibel, CEO of Socialcam, in an email wrote:

1. When you auth the FB app instead of saying Ok, Watch Video it says allow or Go to App (Facebook default language.)
2. When you go to the Socialcam website there is a clear pop up explaining Social Mode.
3. There is an uninstall Socialcam link in the blue Facebook box below the video.
4. On Youtube videos Youtube branding is made extremely clear with Youtube approved logos.
5. Any Youtube video in related is also clearly branded.
6. Social Mode stay off when you switch browsers and/or log out.
7. If you turn Social Mode off on the app or the website it will reflect on the other (it doesn’t display correctly on the app – we are pushing a new version to address this – but it won’t push any Facebook actions.)

Now the hard part begins.

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In reality, what is more likely is that Facebook can turn on or turn off the traffic spigot and hence play the king maker. Bilton quotes an anonymous source as saying, “Facebook is now understanding the type of information it has about what is successful online, or what is a potential threat to Facebook.”

I would take that comment with a pound of salt. Why? Because Facebook is good at hoarding data, but is terrible at interpreting the data: putting a proper context around it and then putting it to use. If you want to know the reason for my skepticism, just look at the lameness/pointlessness of the advertisements that show up next to your stream. For a more clear example of Facebook’s lack of context, just look at the red-hot video apps such as Viddy and Socialcam. On paper they may look the same, but in reality they are as different as chalk and cheddar.

Not all videos are equal

A few months ago, Viddy, a mobile video creation and sharing app, started to use Facebook’s Open Graph to post videos to people’s timelines. For instance, if I took a video clip, edited and shared it, it would show up on Facebook timeline if you viewed the video. If you liked someone’s Viddy video, the action would show up in your news feed (depending on Facebook’s algorithm). If your friend happens to see that item on their news feed on their smartphone, they would in turn get a prompt that gives them the “option” to download the Viddy app.

To be fair, this behavior is no different from how Facebook’s  open graph works for other mobile video apps, social news readers and even music-listening apps such as Spotify. The automatic sharing is what made social news readers targets of criticism, and Viddy too has received  similar criticism. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before Viddy started to show up in everyone’s Facebook feeds and in the process IT became one of the hottest apps on Facebook and on the iTunes Store.

The timing for the app couldn’t be more fortuitous. Viddy exploded within days of Facebook announcing its intentions to acquire photo-sharing service Instagram for about a billion dollars in stock and cash. Viddy benefitted from the “Instagram for video meme.”

The hype around the app increased even more when celebrity investors such as Jay-Z, Biz Stone, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee and Shakira put money in the company. Rumors began  circulating that the company was going to get $30 million in funding at a valuation of around $300 million. Sure enough, Khosla Ventures, Battery Ventures and NEA pumped in major dollars into the company.

Viddy wasn’t the only social-mobile video app benefiting from Facebook’s Open Graph largesse. Another “Instagram of video” wannabe, Socialcam, started to zoom up the charts too and in the process was able to raise a ton of money from angel investors that include Yuri Milner, Ashton Kutcher, Brian Chesky of AirBnB and Ari Emmanuel.

I have been suspicious of the sudden growth spurt in video apps. When I saw long-forgotten video platforms such as Dailymotion and Metacafe starting to show up in my news feed and soon after near the top of the Facebook app charts, I knew something was amiss. Was this a repeat of the social news reader phenomenon? When I posted messages on Facebook bemoaning the spammy-behavior of  many of video apps, the comments on my feed lit up and many cursed out these apps.

I went back to the video apps and saw that Viddy has fallen of the top of the iOS charts and is now down to #48 on the iTunes store. In comparison, Socialcam is still flying high at relatively #2 spot. Viddy in fact has trended down on Appsdata’s daily active app user base as well, while Socialcam is still at top with about 41.4 million monthly active users. Socialcam’s crazy growth started on April 24th. That made me even more curious. What is Socialcam doing that is keeping its flag flying high versus Viddy, which seems to have returned to a more predictable and normal growth curve?

Michael Seibel, chief executive of Socialcam, said the Facebook changes had catapulted his company to one of the top 100 sites on the Internet. “Since then we’ve seen 10 times growth.” [The New York Times]

Something didn’t add up and it wasn’t till you see Socialcam’s popular and trending videos pages that you understand the full picture. These pages are full of videos of crazy Fox newscasters and other stuff, normally the preserve of YouTube. Many of these videos are actually from YouTube, though I am not certain how Socialcam is putting all those videos on their service. The Next Web’s Drew Olanoff went ahead and did a breakdown of how Socialcam is making it all work.

Once you have a lot of users inside of your app, it’s hard to keep them. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that there’s great content for them to find. For a user generated content app like Socialcam, you’d think that the content would come from its users. Unfortunately, that might not be the case here. It appears that Socialcam is pulling in YouTube videos to its service and passing them off as content uploaded by its users.

The way I stumbled onto this is that to view a Socialcam video in your Facebook Newsfeed, you have to sign up for the app, and it’s safe to say that these non-app users account for some of those 36M. It’s a practice similar to that of social readers used by Washington Post and it’s pretty annoying. I’m also an app user and have social sharing off, so none of my video views or comments end up my timeline. However, when I accessed a video through Socialcam’s site via Facebook, social sharing magically turned back on, thus sharing this in the Newsfeed of my friends.

Blurry Picture

Olanoff’s assessment is spot on. In addition, Socialcam is buying traffic (and downloads) from the likes of Tapjoy and FreeAppaDay, thus boosting its total app numbers.

Download the @FreeAppADay.com Store App and wish for top rated paid apps to become FREE for a day [Socialcam iTunes page description]

Socialcam isn’t alone. If you look at the top ten video apps on Facebook, they are essentially repackaging videos from somewhere else.  What I am amazed with is that YouTube and Facebook would allow such behavior. No word from Facebook just yet, but when I asked YouTube, a spokesperson replied:

While we don’t comment on individual cases, we take any violation of our open API’s Terms of Service seriously and take action against known abusers.

When I asked Michael Seibel, CEO of Socialcam, how can they be showing YouTube videos when they are an app for creating videos, he said that more people watch videos than they create videos. And what they are doing is offering people a chance to see videos even when they don’t have friends on Socialcam or videos from friends. He did say that Socialcam has seen about 3 million videos uploaded to the service and are currently seeing between 1,500 to 2,500 videos being uploaded to the service every hour.

When I argued that their approach doesn’t really add up to be “Instagram of video,” Seibel said that it was a label chosen by the media and not by the company. “We have two clear purposes: help you watch videos created and watch by your friends and also create amazing videos.”

A chink in Facebook’s armor?

This is a nice arbitrage scheme that exposes Facebook’s shortcomings. And it has to do with how Facebook’s Open Graph works.

My understanding is that there is a certain amount of inventory in Facebook’s news feed that is devoted to different categories such as news articles, photos, videos, games and music. They try and create a balance within those categories and depending on the click-throughs, comments, likes and shares a certain item gets, that is surfaced in a person’s feed. Now if there is a video with a header – two hot girls kissing or Lil Wayne is gay — how do you think it will do versus your dog running around on a beach? That magic formula has worked for the likes of Socialcam, but to call it Instagram of video is just wrong. Like I said earlier, Viddy is from Venus and Socialcam is from Mars.

The King Maker

The saga of these very different video apps is being played on a much bigger stage. I bet you I am not the only one who has noticed the “Facebook-the-king-maker theme.” I wondered: had Facebook given a deliberate boost to all video apps just to reinforce its value of its platform in the mind of skittish investors? The idea that they could drive app-downloads across platforms – Facebook, Android, iOS and HTML5 – was definitely a way to blunt any questions around company’s questionable (and lagging) mobile strategy. The launch of Facebook Appstore was yet another brilliant PR move to divert attention away from Facebook’s shortcomings.

The last word on this saga comes from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures who writes on his blog:

SEO and Facebook timeline integration is “best practice” on the Internet. You should do both. They can be great free acquisition channels. But they are not great retention channels. Because easy come easy go.

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Givit is a consumer-facing video sharing site from the folks behind white-label video VMIX. The company has already built out all the video infrastructure necessary for managing video distribution online, so now it’s applying that technology to allow consumers to share videos with their friends and family.

Unlike other social video sharing apps, the point of Givit isn’t to distribute videos widely into public social networks like Facebook or Twitter, but to make them viewable only by a small number of users. The typical use case is for families that want to share videos of their children but don’t feel comfortable with those videos being available on the likes of YouTube or other public-facing video sites.

While providing tools to let users limit access to a close circle, it’s making it ultra-easy for friends to watch those videos, from whatever device they’re on — whether it be their laptop or a mobile web browser. That’s because Givit transcodes videos into multiple formats to support a wide range of browsers and devices.

VMIX historically has been focused on the enterprise, with a video distribution platform used by a wide range of media companies. But lately, it’s been exploring different consumer applications. Recently it created a location-based video-sharing application called Vincinty. While not exactly a success, VMIX CEO Greg Kostello told us that they did learn a lot from the service.

As for Givit — the service is in public beta now, and is free to use, but the company is planning to introduce new services under a freemium model. That could include increasing the number of videos or storage space that users have access to, as well as other additional value-added features. But for now, the company is just trying to get more users and figure out how they’re interacting with the service.

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The latest financing is being led by Benchmark Capital, with existing investors Matrix and Rossman also participating. With the round, Klip will add Benchmark general partner Bruce Dunlevie to its board of directors, which also includes Rossman and Josh Hannah of Matrix Partners.

Rossman told is in a phone interview that the company raised more funding mostly due to the huge opportunity that is in front of it. The social, mobile video sharing segment is growing fast, he said, and Klip wants to capture as much share as it can, as quickly as possible. The Klip app has been doing pretty well in the two months it’s been available: Rossman noted that it’s been one of the top-ranked apps for sharing videos via mobile devices. It’s also been in the top 25 for photo and video apps since launch.

That said, it’s still early in the video-sharing segment and there are at least half a dozen similar apps, including Socialcam, Vlix, Viddy and Vibop.

With a long road ahead and plenty of competition, Klip is hoping this latest round of funding will give it some runway and help see it through the next few years.

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Before today, San Francisco-based Socialcam was already the leading video sharing application available for the iPhone. The 2 million download milestone occurred just six months after launch — but more importantly, it comes just two months after Socialcam announced it had hit a million downloads. That shows that the service is catching on and customer acquisition is actually improving with time.

But Socialcam has made a pretty fantastic update to its app by incorporating filters that will let users add a little color to their videos. The app is launching with five “vintage” filters, including 1970s, Bohemian, Noir, Sepia and Rouge; and three “experimental” filters, labeled Acid, Foil and Electronica.

While there are other video sharing apps that allow users to add filters to the things that they shoot — Vlix, Viddy and Vibop come to mind — Socialcam’s implementation adds the filter at the time that the video is shot. And it’s easier than ever to get to those filters — all a user has to do to select one is flick across the screen and a new filter will appear.

The good news in the way Socialcam has implemented filters is that you see what the video looks like before it’s finished, and there’s no timely processing that happens at the end. The bad news is that users don’t have access to any sort of unfiltered raw video file when they’re done shooting.

According to CEO Michael Seibel, Socialcam can build new effect by automatically converting photo filters or graphics into video filters. It’s also separated the filters out from the rest of the app code, giving it the flexibility to quickly add new filters without issuing an actual update to the app.

Socialcam was recently spun out of Justin.tv as a standalone company. The startup, which is based in San Francisco, now has four employees working on the app.

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Twitvid started out as one of countless Twitter video sharing sites, but it has manage to stick around even as a number of its competitors (12seconds, Twitvid.io, Twiddeo) had to shut down. Part of that may have to do with partnerships with popular Twitter clients like TweetDeck; part of it may be because the service embraced mobile platforms early on, publishing its own apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

However, it’s getting awfully crowded again in the social video sharing space these days, with companies like the Justin.tv spin-off and social video network Socialcam and new startups like Tout trying awfully familiar-sounding ideas.

The biggest test for Twitvid may be how it can adapt to Twitter’s own increasingly aggressive media plans. The relaunched Twitter website incorporates more video, and Twitter also teamed up with Photobucket in June to power its own image hosting. One has to wonder when Twitter will extend this kind of partnership to video clips as well, and what this would do to startups like Twitvid.

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With an ever-growing number of consumers walking around with video cameras on their mobile phones, Klip hopes to become the go-to app for shooting, uploading and sharing videos with friends. With a simple interface for connecting to networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Klip makes it easy to reach friends and family where they already are.

Of course, Klip is far from alone in the social/mobile video sharing game. There are any number of startups seeking to own the nascent market and become the Instagram of video. Among others, there’s Socialcam (recently spun out from Justin.tv), BlipSnips, Tout, Vibop, Viddy, Vlix and Vloggo.

Klip’s big differentiator is an ultrafast adaptive-streaming technology that enables users to quickly scroll through elements of a video without having to play the whole thing. It also has a dynamic hashtag system, which lets users create and track different categories attached to videos that are uploaded. And, like most competitors, it also lets users tag their friends in videos, make comments and favorite videos that were uploaded by friends and contacts.

For an idea of how it works, check out this promotional video from Klip:

One other advantage Klip has is its founder: The company was created in April 2011 by serial entrepreneur Alain Rossman, the former chairman of Vudu (before the company was sold to Wal-Mart) and OpenWave, among others. Altogether, Rossman has founded five startups, three of which went public and two of which were acquired. This latest venture has raised $2 million in funding from Rossman and Matrix Partners.

That said, it’s a very crowded market. Klip has very cool technology, but it will also need consumer adoption to make it worthwhile for most users. With a number of competitors already vying for consumers’ attention when it comes to sharing their videos on social networks, Klip has a tough road ahead.

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