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Congrats to FireAnt on acquisition

Ahhh, FireAnt - the little company that couldn’t just got bought by another company that couldn’t (ODEO, bought by Sonic Mountain) for $400k.

I first posted about FireAnt in April, where I pointed out that their branding was confusing, their traffic was petering out, and that not having either the old or the new player available for download was bizarre.

I revisited FireAnt a week later (expecting some updates), to receive website errors, and a sputtering, angry response from founder Josh Kinberg.

Since that time, 6 months have passed - and nothing has changed on FireAnt. No new software (still in beta, I suppose). Not even the featured channels on the front page have changed.

So - congrats to FireAnt for getting bought; it seems like the best option as the company no longer seemed to be able to execute on their own - its too bad, I was really pumped about FireAnt when I first stumbled across it. The 400k acquisition price I’m sure adequately reflects the value FireAnt brings to the table after a year of stagnation.

fireant, odeo, podcasts vlogs

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FireAnt.tv - Confusion

I had hoped to post a full review of FireAnt - the social / vlog player and community, but I’ve been stymied by a buggy and confusing website.

As I understand it, FireAnt consists of a downloaded desktop client, and a social hub website. I couldn’t test the client as I couldn’t find it to download, and problems with the website began in registration, where it ran into PHP missing parameter errors. The prominent appeals to try “FireAnt Beta v2″ dead-end with a send-your-email-address-into-the-void form, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to download “v1″ client or anything else.

In the end, what I was left with was a website of videos organized by content channels, played within the site with QuickTime, and including post-roll advertisements. You can rate and tag videos, and add them to your “playlist” - a feature which doesn’t seem to do anything without the desktop application. Tagging and well-thought out content categories make it easy to find good video, and the notion of the website and desktop client staying in sync (i.e.: building your playlist) is appealing if un-testable at the moment.

The social opportunities on the site itself have been missed, or at least unrealized - on the website there are no comments, no “who else liked this video,” no “other people who liked this also enjoyed,” or any functionality beyond a basic web-media player. Clicking the “People” tab takes you to a search form only; the one trial search I did yeilded a person who’s playlist consisted of pr0n - something to do with a “mexicum threesome,” which I decided not to watch. Perhaps the desktop client more fully realizes the social potential here, or perhaps the website is awaiting a future release to do so.

So - I was pretty disappointed. When I originally stumbled across FireAnt, I’d hoped to have discovered a JOOST in sheep’s clothing - especially after reading TechCrunch’s coverage (FireAnt Just Rocks). With the site offering user-created content channels and touting the fact that…

FireAnt has 19,835 channels and 1,110,256 episodes, and adding more each day!

…it seems like the issues at hand are (a) getting the desktop client back on the site, and (b) buidling out the social infrastructure on the site itself.

I hope their upcoming Beta release has some great features.

blogging, fireant, joost, mexicum, social, threesome vlogs

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