IP Democracy: Share2Me Aims for Toolbar Video Sharing

A start-up that debuted at DEMO 07 last month has an ambitious goal: to make video (and photo, music, text, web page) sharing as easy as possible across as many communications platforms as possible. Mike Blackwell, CEO of Nextumi, briefed me yesterday on the company’s new digital sharing solution called Share2Me.

Currently in Beta mode, Share2Me is a very simple tool. Sign up at the site and provide Share2Me with user i.d.s and passwords for your various email, social networking and IM accounts and the system will automatically retrieve all your contacts through these various online communications tools. Then, Share2Me’s logo will appear in your toolbar (either IE or Firefox) and you’re ready to go. I signed up while Mike guided me and the whole process took about four minutes.

Once you’re in the system, Share2Me allows you to share almost instantly via email or IM any video, web page, photo or text you wish to share. But, the coolest feature is that Share2Me allows the user to automatically publish material to MySpace, and in a week or two, Facebook.

The Share2Me tool skips altogether the need to copy, say, YouTube’s “embed video” or URL code if you want to publish a video to a social networking site or if you want to share it via IM or email. Nextumi’s Blackwell said that the company is working on adding blogging platforms to Share2Me too.

Nextumi arrived at the idea of Share2Me based on research the company conducted on the web-based communications habits of young people (ages 15 to 24). What Nextumi discovered is something we all know intuitively — young people don’t use email to communicate with each other. They use IM, Facebook or MySpace and, increasingly, text messages.

Young people also share more stuff than other age groups. But, it’s a hassle to share across different platforms, with code copying and what-not.

“People we talk to check their MySpace or Facebook five times per day and they’ve got IM up and running,” Blackwell said. “We found that they were more willing to share stuff more so than any other demographic.”

So, “we saw a big opportunity to make this easier for people. That’s the whole goal. Make it faster and easier for people to share stuff that they want to share.” Right now, video sharing is a relatively messy process when in fact “the person on the other end should just be able to get it” without a lot of contortions, such as downloading players, Blackwell said.

It is extraordinarily easy to share content with your contacts using Share2Me, but the system has some drawbacks. For one thing, AIM recognizes Share2Me messages as a bot and you can’t currently IM a video (or, I suppose, any kind of content) to this most popular of all IM platforms. “We hope to have that resolved very soon,” Blackwell, a former veteran of AOL, said.

Facebook isn’t part of the set-up yet either, although Blackwell expects that to be resolved in a week or two. And despite it’s ability to instantly send content to capable cell phones, Nextumi has to work directly with the carriers to get this done, or at least to get it done in a way that doesn’t cost the user a fortune in fees. “We’re getting popped for a nickel or whatever every time we send the message through and will do so until we have a deal with the carriers,” he said. That’s in the future too.

For now, Nextumi is hoping to give Share2Me some viral steam. In March it will kick off a “full-blown marketing campaign” that hits the youth demographic, which is not always easy. To achieve word-of-mouth momentum among the elusive young people, Share2Me has hired a well-known web-based “character” (Blackwell wouldn’t say who) to pitch the tool. Think along the lines of someone at the level of lonelygirl, Blackwell hints, although Share2Me hasn’t hired her.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on February 21, 2007 8:19 AM to IP Democracy