Hellodeo and Twttr

Smaller is better. After watching google swing and miss on checkout and spreadsheets, two new products from the extremely creative folks at Odeo prove it definitively.

Hellodeo uses an embedded flash object to capture video from your web cam and save it, youtube-style, on their servers. The object provides a link to drop the Hellodeo player, cued up with your video, into a blog post (see above). All this, without a login, without a beta, without a rulebook. Simple and brilliant. It was a little flakey with Safari on my MacBook, but ran without incident in Flock.

Twttr makes SMS messaging social and takes user-created content to its minimalist extreme. Send messages tracking your whims and the minutia of your day to create your timeline. “Friends” receive your timeline on their phones. Again, simple and brilliant. Not for me, because my days are repetitive and the list of people who would find them interesting is short.

I could imagine the social-enablement Twttr would have provided when I was a college student—i.e. when I still had friends¹. Inadvertent flashmobs appearing at off-campus parties? Swarms hitting the mexican restaurant at 3 AM? This is the tool we lacked 15 years ago. We would have still been nerds, but at least we would have been nerds with well-coordinated social activities.

MySpace, with its dependency on a web user browsing on a solitary terminal in a basement somewhere, can never be truly social. Demented and sad, but not social. Twttr, on the other hand, brings the flighty impermanence and horrifying grammar of MySpace to people who really have friends.

These new sites represent the best of Web 2.0, irreverent and surgically-focused. I think it is no coincidence that the kids at Odeo are hammering away in Ruby on Rails. The liberating constraints of ROR help developers stay focused on the brilliant idea, not the spirit-deadening process.

¹ In the interest of full disclosure, I have actually made some new friends lately. Apparently I am now more fun or more friendly than I was for the past couple of years.