A Quick Take on Qik: Mobile Social Media is Here. Kind Of.

In days past people would tune in to late-night talk shows on the television to catch up with banter from stars, politicians and comedians. These days the bleary-eyed can look forward to "tweets" - messages from Twitter members - inviting people to join them in a Qik session. Qik enables people with video-enabled mobile phones to stream their video to the Web and to join in text chats with people who've been notified of their instant events or leave comments. Your Qik videos are stored at Qik's site for later retrieval, building a library of online conversations and events. A nifty concept, but one that is, like the Twitter network on which people tell people about Qik happenings, a work in progress.

When you first connect to a Qik it's kind of neat - you see people milling about, things happening,  so you type in a chat message and then...nothing happens. In the few Qiks that I've received so far, the signal drops within a few minutes at most and there doesn't seem to be any self-sustaining chats. Like in Twitter's early phases (and for that matter until the code jocks arrived there a few days ago) Qiks come and go with the tantalizing promise of something interesting that isn't delivering up to its potential just yet. I was especially intrigued by Robin Good 's late-night visit to a jazz club in Rome - a lot more fun to be part of that than your typical conference mixer. Robin Good has made active use of Qik for several months, but the use of Twitter in combination with Qik adds a real-time messaging aspect to the service for people on the go that enables them to catch things as they're happening. Qik includes GPS-enabled location information as well, so a quick tweet can let you peek in on a scene and see if it's worth checking out and then check the location information to see where it is.

It's not clear that there's much of a business model for Qik - probably destined for an exit in the next year would be my guesstimate - but in the meantime I think that it's bringing us one step closer to mobile video calls that will provide meaningful personal content to both personal and general audiences. As with Twitter, Qik seems to have its own personal protocols that need to be mastered - do that many people know how to get people to put on a good video show? - but short of that with the combot of Twitter and Qik I think that we'll be hearing a lot more about mobile video in the year ahead. I'm waiting for a Qik driver that works with my phone (or for a new phone later this year) but I think that I'll give it a shot the next time that I am at a trade show. It would be a lot nicer to shoot Qik segments of vendors and then just line up links to them on my blog than to fuss with stringing together video segments into a cohesive video blog entry. Looking forward to your Qik tweets!