Mesmo knows what your friends are watching

Several weeks ago I learned about Mesmo.TV, a social site for video recommendations. I tried it, found it confusing, and didn't write it up. This morning the Mesmo site officially launched. It's still confusing. But Mesmo's Facebook app is a different story. It's much cleaner and easier to get into than the Web site. It's also more powerful, since the community is built in.

Simply, Mesmo lets you flag the video content you like--TV shows, online video clips, and video podcasts--and also see what your friends like. When you want to expand your viewing universe, you can easily find the friends who share common interests in shows with you, and then see what else they like.

It's somewhat similar to StumbleUpon's StumbleVideo. Both find videos. But the connective tissue on Mesmo is primarily your friends, not the content, which makes it a more enjoyable experience.

Mesmo reminds me more of the music community site iLike, which lets you share your media preferences with friends and see what they like. But since most online video is free and music is not, Mesmo is a bit better: When you see what a friend likes, you can generally watch it (links to network broadcast shows go to the network's page for the show, which may or may not have a stream available). You can also purchase shows through the service--streaming rights from Amazon Unbox for now, physical DVDs later.

The other big similarity between iLike and Mesmo is that both the applications are better on Facebook than they are as standalone Web applications. That's mostly due to the community features that Facebook applications inherit for free, but also due to the clean design aesthetics on Facebook. Many Web applications try to hard to look different, while most Facebook applications seem to be built to be instantly grokkable to existing Facebook users.

See also Where to Find Good Video, on NewTeeVee.