Since my post last week, Justin.TV is no more.
I’m not really sure why I feel so sad about this news. I haven’t visited the site in a while. I just have those fond memories of the start of the site and how JTV jump-started my move to San Francisco.
Justin.TV posted a video that’s worth watching. The site and its content is gone forever but luckily I have a backup.
It was some time in 2007 shortly after my 5th Macworld Expo visit that Scott Beale of LaughingSquid tweeted about Justin.TV. He hosted a drink-up (common in SF at the time) and invited Justin and team along. My first experience with the guys was sending them paypal cash to pay for a round of drinks. Still living in St. Augustine with Laura at the time, I was already on the verge of moving to SF but had yet to really put things in motion. LaughingSquid promoted my Macworld events and Scott Beale eventually ended up tweeting my resume out to thousands of followers in 2008 which helped me land the job at Yoono.
That’s why that first evening of buying a round of drinks for JTV & LS over Twitter was awesome and really memorable for me. Not a pretty output but here’s the exchange via Twitter from 2007: (remember back then @ replies / mentions weren’t a thing @ was invented by users but the person you’re @ing had to see it in their normal stream)
$26 measly dollars but it was the start of something great.
I was one of the first people to join JTV after the initial wave of promoted broadcasters like Justine. I didn’t have a mobile camera so I setup a Logitech camera at my home office and another at my office. The office camera had a disabled microphone to keep business talk out but the home camera was just live most evenings. I averaged 5-20 people during the ‘shows’ and as many as 100 during times when I was doing one of my 2 podcasts. I did some semi-mobile JTV shows at some point in 2007 by getting a Verizon AirCard for my MacBook but it was minimal.
Actually, I met Nick Starr through JTV or one of the other nine services that popped up at that time. He would broadcast his weekly drive from Tampa to Orlando and we’d chat during the ride. It was an exciting time to be able to broadcast from a phone and we were pioneers for using the services so transparently.
Here are a few photos from that life casting era before MWSF2008:
For 2008 Macworld in SF, Justin.TV let me use their Sony Vaio recording setup for the entire week. I had a live stream on the MacworldBound and DailyTechTalk sites with my friend Sam Downie. This is also the Macworld that I first learned the romantic elements of new-media were not all that they were cracked up to be when Sam and I were at Starbucks at 3rd & Powell and Walt Mossberg from WSJ at the time came in and discussed Apple on the evening before the big keynote. He didn’t say much and we warned him he was being recorded and streamed but the letter I received the next day from him was very serious threatening a lawsuit if we didn’t remove the video. I personally didn’t feel much was revealed but we complied. So much for everyone being friends in the tech world.
The week of streaming was a lot of fun! Sam and I stayed with Bill Palmer in a hostel, streamed from the keynote, parties and exhibit hall. We had a really great viewership all week! it opened up a lot of opportunities for me. Here are some photos:
I lifecasted quite a bit in May of 2008 when I came to San Francisco for a week to do some house-hunting. Again, JTV let me borrow a wireless cam setup and my girlfriend Laura could see the places I was touring and give feedback. That’s also the first time I utilized an SMS relay service so instead of having to Google where I was or where to go next, I could just say it and a few hundred people could tell me what to do via chat. This was before Siri. I was roaming around at night photographing the city and simply exclaimed, “I’m lost and hungry” Directions and a pizza place recommendation were delivered instantly. It felt like the future.
All I had to give up was just a little privacy. Most importantly, tilting the camera up in the air during bathroom breaks and covering the mic during important convos. I remember getting a chat message at 11:30PM after a night of drinking that people had screen capped my credit card number and ATM pin during a late night trip to the ATM when If forgot to tilt the camera away.
I kept streaming when I got back to Florida and packed up my life. We broadcasted my 21st and 22nd birthdays, my going away party / Laura’s birthday. A few of us played guitar hero live on JTV and I talked out my fears and thoughts on moving so far away from home. For a while, it replaced the content on this blog and I really enjoyed it.
Here are a few shots of me using the service after the move to SF in June of 2008:
I even used the camera to broadcast from my laptop when giving speeches or seminars. That seminar pictured below helped me start the side-project I work on now, “Tweet for my Biz” where we do on-demand tech support for startups.
I used the service off and on throughout 2008 when the next logical thing happened. I registered Justin.TV/AdamsBlock so I could “show my family back home the sights and sounds that keep me up at night.
AdamsBlock launched and in a week, there were a few hundred people watching the channel. I was sincerely just capturing life the way I always had. There was /AdamJacksonLive and /AdamsBlock. There was also /AdamsiPhone and other channels on Ustream and Qik.tv. These were all extensions of life casting just like my Twitter and Blog presence.
AdamsBlock made national news with appearances on NPR, CNN, Fox and local media. We had a quarter of a million viewers after a month and 1 million after 2 months. I’d walk around with my camera on and then get home and see 12,000 people watching AdamsBlock.It was just a street corner, a noisy one but nothing special. The site opened me up to a lot of new opportunities and I embraced them but I also made the mistake of doing what I had always done, living extremely transparent. The popularity with transparency equalled my downfall and soon, where I lived and worked and my friends weren’t safe.
Here’s one of the many news articles about that short-lived project.
After thanksgiving, I shut down the camera and left the apartment.
I found this compilation on LiveLeak that has some of AdamsBlock’s moments. There were many hundreds of clips but I don’t care enough to upload them to YouTube You can find them around though – http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=8f7_1238543944
I worked with some people to make AdamsBlock a scalable idea but they didn’t have time to commit and neither did I. so the idea sort of went away as one of those cool Internet things that never caught on. I sometimes get what you’d call fan-mail from that era which is cool. Actually, when I heard Twitch / Justin.TV were being sold last month, I thought of putting AdamsBlock back online from my new house in New Hampshire. About 25,000 people who followed the channel would all receive an email that I had gone live and they could see the new ‘AdamsBlock’ but I didn’t get around to it. It would have been fun.
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Since AdamsBlock, I broadcasted a few more times on my other channels from time to time when cooking or playing video games or walking about in the city. I did a few videos while traveling but nothing too elaborate. For the most part, I wanted to get back in touch with that first wave of JTV newness. It all started with $26 over paypal and lead to where I am today.
Seeing Justin.TV offline is sad. That’s how the Internet works though and I honestly had zero regrets about any of it .It would be fun to go back and do things over again and correct some mistakes that were made but that’s all in the past now.
I’m glad the founders of JTV who started 7 whole years ago have found success, happiness and wealth. It was a really great service and did truly change my life.
Just a month after walking away from life casting as a full time gig, I saw in the audience with 1200 people at Macworld 2009 and watched MacHeads premiere starting me and 4 other people. It was a proud moment because among a lot of very talented Mac ‘celebrities’, I remember the cheers for me being so loud when I came on the big screen. Later, a friend told me ‘you stole the show!’. You can watch Macheads in its entirety here.
I went on to work at a few startups and eventually work brought me to New Hampshire. Life casting was indeed one of the defining moments of my time in San Francisco. It’ll never be forgotten. I never blogged about this but if anyone is interested, you can read a bit about my time in SF w/ some reflection now that I live in NH in the book, “Status Update” on Amazon. It was written about a few of us and my chapter in the book was based on 4 interviews from 2009 – 2013 conducted by the author.