When I talked to Justin.tv spokesman Matthew DiPietro right before the Socialcam launch, he told me the company was applying some of the lessons it had learned from adding livestreaming to the Justin.tv mobile app to the new service. One lesson was that users care a lot more about video quality and the app’s social components than they do about whether or not the video is live, he said. So the goal of Socialcam is to make it super-easy to upload videos from your phone, then share them on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere.
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By comparison, the existing Justin.tv app has been downloaded more than 4 million times. When I asked DiPietro today whether Socialcam might eventually eclipse the company’s old app, he said:
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With Socialcam, we believe strongly that we’ve created something that people will use, and that we’ve solved a problem that was keeping people from sharing video as a part of their everyday mobile and social media habits. The potential is gigantic. The numbers so far are very encouraging, but of course only time will tell.
The San Francisco startup is backed by Alsop Louie Partners, Tim Draper, and incubator Y Combinator.
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