Social video sharing app Viddy is publicly debuting its Facebook Timeline integration today, through the social network’s Timeline app platform, which allows Viddy users to share their 15 second videos directly to their profile. Viddy’s focus on capturing brief, beautiful moments on video using iPhone devices fits well with Facebook’s attempts to tug heartstrings with its nostalgia-inspiring Timeline, but can the integration help social video find its Instagram moment?
Viddy CEO and co-founder Brett O’Brien certainly believes it can, and the numbers the app has been seeing since its soft-launch of Facebook Timeline features in mid-February back that up. “Viddy’s monthly Facebook uniques have jumped from 80,000 to 900,000 monthly unique users within Facebook and Viddy content has generated over 270 million impressions within Facebook,” O’Brien said in an interview with BetaKit. “Every key metric of the business has increased substantially.”
O’Brien believes the uptick in interest can be directly attributed to how well Timeline works for media sharing. “Timeline is a perfect product for video, particularly for a mobile social video app like Viddy,” he said. “Timeline is visual and a creative expression of a consumer’s life through Facebook. Viddy is all about enabling consumers to easily and quickly capture, beautify and share memorable moments.”
Viddy isn’t the first app to try to do for mobile video what Instagram has helped do for mobile photos; Justin.tv spin-off Socialcam announced it crossed the 3 million download threshold back in December 2011, and 12seconds.tv attempted something similar both on the web and via an iPhone app, but failed to gain enough traction to maintain long-term viability. 12seconds, which debuted on the iPhone in 2008, may have been ahead of its time however, and O’Brien believes Viddy has the edge on Socialcam, since it focuses on provider greater editorial and creative flexibility.
“Viddy is the only mobile social video application that enables users to transform raw video into cinematic, stylized video clips with one click “production packs” (similar to Instagram filters), that add soundtracks, transitions and special effects to the original video,” O’Brien said, noting that the original video is also preserved in the process. He also called Viddy “a creative community of video lovers” that “create videos worth sharing,” which suggests an emphasis on the creative/artistic aspect of video, similar to how Vimeo positions itself to competitors like YouTube in the full-length video sharing market.
The Facebook integration should produce a significant shot in the arm for Viddy’s user base, but social mobile video apps still have to prove they have the kind of staying power that apps like Instagram have displayed in the mobile photo realm. Watching Viddy’s progress following this new integration should be a good indicator of how viable these apps are over time.