So microblogging+presence isn’t such a bad service to provide in Google’s mind…

The question is: how many dollars/user are they going to pay? In my opinion Jaiku has about 0,5M users… would the total be more or less than $50M?

We’ll see. In the meanwhile, congratulations to Jaiku’s guys: well done!*

*Any analogy with the “An Officer and a Gentleman” ending is purely accidental.

As any other dad, I desired Hictu, I planned it, I attended its birth, presented it to my friends and relatives, and I’m notifying all these people each time there are news: new features, new comments, something unexpected…

Jokes apart, we decided to provide a free, public beta version as soon as possible. We launched Hictu on December 2006, gathering critics and suggestions that made it possible for us to grow and refine our identity: a community for video microbloggers. Mashable wrote about it, and again in September.

Microblogging was a quite mature tool for marketing and building social networks, but we added a simple yet differentiating feature: video posts (recorded directly from the browser).

Yesterday Techcrunch presented Seesmic, a new startup:

The service can be described as a video based Twitter, although it is also much more than that. The grand vision behind Seesmic is for it to become a very open online video/television service where people are constantly interacting around both user generated and professional content.

As Luca commented, this seems to be describing Hictu, but Techcrunch has never wrote a line about it… quite odd.

Yesterday I’ve read why Seesmic is interesting and Hictu is not: we didn’t move to San Francisco (note: we are based in a wonderful island in the Mediterranea sea, Sardinia). I’m referring to a blog post by Robert Scoble, in which he compares Seesmic and Hictu and presents the launch of the former as an example.

There are three points:
1. The founder, Loic Le Meur, visited many bloggers and filmed their meeting
2. The founder, Loic Le Meur, moved to San Francisco
3. Seesmic uses Twitter APIs (my note: this means that Seesmic in the future will depend on Twitter).

Maybe it’s because I don’t live in California but I’ve always thought, even in a buzz-centric industry as Web 2.0 is, that facts matter.

Robert, did you try Hictu? Did you send me your suggestions through the “Hictu as you like it” section? Did you invite your friends? Did you ask me what we are going to provide in the future? Did you create and embed a videopost? Did you notice that Hictu in itself is a mashup of many different IM and VoIP services?

In the meanwhile, since Seesmic is still in a private alpha, I subscribed to try it and I’m waiting to check it out and write down my view, after I’ve been using it for a while.

Today I present a review of my activity. I hope you’ll enjoy that reading and be willing to go deeper for some points.

You can see the entire list of my posts here.

1. Are Comparison Search Engines threatened by Google? Read David Hawk’s view. (Jeremy Liew reprises the same point)

2. So, maybe Hictu is not about microblogging rather than Tumblelogging? (I do not like this word…)

3. Hictu in the Top 100 Search Engines? Odd enough…

4. Keyword search on Twitter? Something I look forward to use…

5. Jaiku’s guru interviewed by Michael Moser.

6. Relevant Mind helps consumer in choosing the best product: useful tool (and I’m waiting for the windsurf section…)