User engagement can be a very slippery statistic. Although sites and apps like to talk about how fast their unique visitors are growing, it’s more important to know how many of those users are actually using the site regularly.
When Facebook made it easy to share what videos you were watching, many apps rocketed up the app-charts and saw a sharp increase in the usage and downloads of these apps. Well, it seems the party has come to an end — quickly.
More than nine million apps and services use Facebook Connect, the Open Graph developer platform, which gives company powers to predict the future. It can turn on the traffic spigot for some apps such as Socialcam. But it can turn off the spigot, equally fast.
Viddy has apparently been pulled from the Apple App Store, not long after quickly rising up the ranks of free video and camera applications available for the iPhone. The removal was due to concerns over adult material that was being posted on the app.
It was just two months ago that Palo Alto-based startup Klip released a mobile app for shooting videos on your iPhone and sharing them with friends. Now, just a few months later, the startup is going back for another $8 million in a Series B round.
Before today, Socialcam was already the leading video sharing application available for the iPhone. But it’s getting even better with a pretty fantastic update to its app that adds filters, and will let users add a little color to their videos.
The latest mobile video sharing app, called Klip, aims to separate itself from the crowd with high-speed adaptive bit-rate technology enabling users to scroll through videos and a new tagging system that lets them set categories to keep track of when new videos are uploaded.
Vlix, a mobile video sharing app that adds Instagram-like filters is joining a long line of start-ups and apps that are trying to do precisely the same thing. To bad, none of these apps aping Instagram know what really matters to the app users.
Socialcam was always a departure from Justin.tv’s live streaming business. After all, Socialcam is all about capturing videos and sharing them with friends later. Still, it was surprising to learn that the Socialcam app would be spinning out of Justin.tv and going it alone.
Social video service Tout is taking a big step to broadening usage, with new capabilities that will allow users to share moments with friends even if they don’t have its iPhone app. It’s also improved communications between users, with the ability to reply to friends’ videos.
