Phun with Phreadz

Sat down this evening to have a good play with Phreadz, a video based social network (think Twitter with Video) now that its ourt of alfalfa mode and into closed beetroot mode. I've looked at Seesmic and Qik before, which are in the same space, but - in my opinion - Phreadz is easier to use than Seesmic, and more flexible than Qik as it takes mobile media in and also a whole lot of other input. It takes media from a huge range of sources - live webcams, most media file types (audio, photo, video) , Youtube, Seesmic and Qik of course, Blip.tv, and Slideshare. It also takes mobile input via a Phreadz email address, but I didn't have time to test that.

I gave it a fairly non-trivial use case - taking input from a camcorder via a laptop (a standard mobile mediahead config) and allowing it to be used as:

- webcam,
- live camcorder
- stored media file playout device

In addition I tried it out with a Slideshare presentation.

You can see the camcorder as videocamera taking a video of the Phreadz screen in the embedded file below:



Net net it performed very well - I had no problems getting it to take the camcorder - it just saw it and started to record from it. Ditto an uploaded Youtube video, a saved piece of my video, and real time feed from the camcorder-as-webcam and camcorder-as-TV camera. Ditto Slideshare.

The dynamics of using it as a social network were also fairly simple and intuitive - replying to comments, following friends, navigating the menus etc. Its very quick as well.

Next steps - I'm going to give it 3 more things to deal with:

- a composite media file that I pre-mix
- a mobile video upload
- an audio / slideshare composite media

As I noted the first time I looked at Seesmic, I'm not convinced about VideoTwittering - but this platform can do so many other things. Its quite interesting - after an evening playing, there are quite a number of other things I can imagine doing with it. As with Twitter, the unified comms nature and extreme simplicity lend themselves to high adaptability