First, Bloglines announces that it’s shutting down.  That one I never saw coming.
Now, 12Seconds.tv is announcing it will shut down in a few weeks:
“As you probably know, everything has a life cycle.    12seconds is in its twilight.    After all the new product launches and attempts at a revenue model, fundraising with VCs and late night coding sessions…it’s time to call it.    It is time to end 12seconds.”
This one doesn’t really surprise me.
I never really understood the appeal of 12Seconds, which is essentially Twitter for video clips: you have 12 seconds to record whatever’s on your mind at a given moment.  It’s one thing to read a few lines of text from people you know or have never met.  But to stop what you’re doing and watch all those videos, even short ones…well, talk about a time-suck!
The home page at 12Seconds advises its users that the service is ending on October 22, and those who’ve recorded “thousands” of videos and posted them on the site will be sent instructions for downloading them so they’ll still have them when the site goes dark in less than three weeks.  Those who’ve recorded “thousands” of 12-second videos should also get a smack in the head, the message did not add.
12seconds was fun for a little while. I once thought it actually had decent potential (because of the length of the messages), but in the end, microvlogging either just isn't meant to be or we're too early to it. (Remember when Seesmic was a video community?)
My recent post Five years of jaredwsmithcom on WordPress half a month late