Webcams Get Community on Vlip

Videoconferencing service SightSpeed Friday launched a personal webcam community called Vlip. All you need is a webcam of your own to post to the site, either starting a conversation or participating in an existing one. However, the site isn’t standing up well to launch-day traffic, so you may want to bookmark it for later.

The idea, said SightSpeed CEO Peter D. Csathy in a phone call this morning, is to create an active message board community where the mode of communication of video. He contrasts this with video-sharing sites, where a small portion of the viewership typically contributes the vast majority of the content.

Companies like WengoVisio, VideoEgg, and YouTube offer webcam uploads, but not at the center of a destination site, with webcam specific features like embeddable conversation threads and click-to-call responses. That’s where Vlip is hoping to be different.

While pushing these tools forwards is useful, I can’t say it makes sense to me to have a free-form, blank-slate message board — text, audio, video, whatever. Seems like adding such tools as a white-label service to communities that already have something to talk about would be more useful — and perhaps more viable as a business model than straight-out advertising.

First things first though, the Vlip site could use a design, functionality– the embed code is so ugly I’m having trouble using it — and uptime overhaul.

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