I’ve been testing out Seesmic for the past few days now and I must say I’m really liking it. For those who don’t know, Seesmic is a new startup that can most easily (but maybe not best) be described as Twitter only with short video updates instead of short text updates. Though it’s in a very small pre-alpha testing phase with only a few hundred users, there is a surprising amount of conversation going on already – and ones that showcase why such a service could be great.

People’s responses to one another on various topics are some of the most interesting posts. Unlike Twitter, you can finally hear a person’s tone and inflection – which can really change the entire meaning of a post. The videos also work great for those moments when describing something in text would be nearly impossible, so instead why not just show them? Then of course it’s always just interesting to put a face and an actual voice to a post. There is a much stronger feeling of connection and identification when watching Seesmic posts as opposed to reading Twitter posts.

While the obvious thought of some would be to have Twitter simply add video as an option, I’m not sure I would even want that. First of all one of the best things about Twitter is how easy it is to update while on-the-go (and in certain bad situations), Seemic so far has no ability to update with videos taken with a phone (though Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur says they are working on this). Second, there is still something enduring about the 140 character-limit imposed by Twitter – it inspires people to quickly say what they might otherwise be long-winded about. For Twitter to impose something similar for video, the videos would have to be about 20 seconds long (which actually might be kind of interesting too). (I also shudder at the thought of what video would do to Twitter’s servers after all the issues they had with the 140 character updates earlier this year).

There is also the issue of accessibility. Despite the rapid rise of the Mac, there are still many people out there without webcams. While there is also the manual upload (or posting a link to a video) option, the vast majority of web users are still mostly in the dark when it comes to creating video for the web. No such requirements and/or learning curve exist with a simply text-based service like Twitter.

I’m not sure that a service like Seesmic and Twitter couldn’t and/or shouldn’t co-exist. As a few Seesmic posters have pointed out, they find themselves seeing how they look before they post a video – I’m sure almost everyone does this even if it’s just reviewing the video before they post it. There will be times (like when you first wake up in the morning before you shower) that might not be conducive to a Seesmic post, but are just fine for a Twitter post. The fact that the two work so nicely together right now – if you input your Twitter account information into Seesmic, it will automatically send a tweet from your Twitter account with a static link to your newest Seesmic post – I think is how the two should interact going forward, they can compliment each other if people don’t worry so much about them being rivals.

Something like Pownce, with its picture and video embeds and mp3 uploads is a bit more tricky. I certainly could see Pownce moving into this video-update arena – though again, I think most would probably fear the bandwidth required for such an undertaking with video.

As Seesmic continues to grow towards a beta release, it’ll be interesting to see not only how the service scales not only in terms of service responsiveness, but also in terms of keeping conversations going and making it easy to sift through all the updates to find what you want. While there is the ability to mark certain users to follow, the public stream is still the most interesting aspect, but only having 8 videos per ‘page’ in the left column could get rather time consuming if there were thousands of postings a day. While people are using the @username convention to respond to others, there is currently no way to easily click on something to see what they are actually responding to. I’m sure things like this will be addressed, but doing so while keeping the service running briskly will likely be a challenge.

As I said, Seesmic is in a very early, pre-alpha build and as such, membership is very limited for the time being. Before I get bombarded with requests, no I currently don’t have any invites to give away. If that changes, I’ll be sure to let you know. Seesmic looks like a real winner, I’m sure we’ll all be hearing a lot more about it in the next year or so.