Robo.to TV Turns Status Messages Into Art

You know the viral “Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years“? Well, what if Noah took a 4-second video of himself instead? And what if everyone else did, too? That’s kind of the effect you get from the new Robo.to TV service, a derivation of a product from Particle, a San Francisco-based web product shop.

Robo.to’s main function is simple — a place to post clips that are sort of a webcam status message, with no sound and a time limit of 4 seconds. You can use the GIF-like autoplaying video Robo.to creates for you as a sort of avatar that displays your most recent mood or location — or that’s the idea anyway, as compared with Seesmic (which doesn’t really do video anymore) or 12seconds, which use video clips more conversationally.

The new Robo.to TV mode stitches updates together, either as a selection of members or sorted by metadata. (Check out the #everyone example video embedded above.) I’m not really sure if Robo.to TV is an art project or a product, and Particle co-founder and CTO Aubrey Anderson said that’s yet to be determined by seeing how people use it. So far, Robo.to itself is proving to be rather popular — in part because investor Justin Timberlake is already a built-in celebrity spokesman. Particle CEO Rey Flemings said Robo.to has had 20,000 active users, 100,000 videos, and 375,000 visitors in the last month, and it only launched in May.