What Twitter brought to text-based communications online, San Francisco, Calif.-based Tout is now bringing to video through a community of people instantly updating their Facebook friends and Twitter followers with short video status updates captured via a user’s smartphone.
The Tout application is now available for free download via Apple Inc.’s App Store, and once downloaded, enables users to point, shoot and share short, real-time “video status updates” with friends. At the Tout website, users can follow family, friends or people with shared interests and get real-time updates as they “tout” moments from their lives. Each tout is a short smartphone video of 15 seconds or less and provides a streamlined way to connect, communicate, update a user’s status and engage with friends and followers.
“Some moments in life just can’t be reflected in text. Tout delivers ‘life as it happens’ in full-motion color and sound, as opposed to ‘life as it’s written in 140 characters or less’,” said CEO Michael Downing, founder of Tout. “Not everybody has witty and well-crafted writing skills to express themselves in blogs or tweets, but we all have unique visual perspective and, these perspectives will be the basis of a new form of conversation and storytelling moving forward.”
The tout experience draws on the emerging consumer behavioral movement called “visual conversation,” a more human way to socially connect online. Visual conversation draws from the converging trends of the ubiquitous ability to capture media anywhere on the fly with smartphones, blend billions of visual elements already on the web that can be re-mixed into new messages, and the ability to quickly process visual media. The result is an expressive ecosystem of high-engagement activity, unencumbered by barriers to participation.
Tout has tested the application for the last month with a small group of influential personalities from the technology and entertainment industries. One example is from Stephen Fishbach, finalist on the CBS show “Survivor.”
“Being able to give my followers and friends an instantaneous window into my world, literally enabling them to see what I see, is incredibly powerful,” said Fishbach. “It lets me build new kinds of relationships with my community.”
