10 July 2008 by Lars

Thoughts on Qik

Qik is a website for streaming video from cameras. Nice. Another way to compromise privacy. Or show cool stuff to friends. Well, they’re in beta, so I’ll give them some slack, but here is where it doesn’t get it quite right yet:

• They have recently added ‘groups’ to their service. So you can be member of a group, or not. But: not exactly fine-grained – any member of the group can see every other members videos (those marked for group). Probably fine
• But: you can only ex-post associate a video stream with a group. So you cannot live-stream for a group only

What they actually do a tad better than f.i. Sports Tracker is that they coarsen your geography – so I don’t show up with the city or even my internet access point – I show up centered on the country (“United States”, “Canada”, “Ecuador”). That’s better for some – but again, for others, you might actually want to reveal more information (in the group, for instance). Both of these sites would gain from some better “geo-coarsening” tools.