Robo.to, the  service we highlighted as competing to be your cell phone’s “social address book”, has also launched a Web “TV” version today.

Robo.to lets users record four-second video status updates and these are now being streamed in channel-like themes, several of them started by Justin Timberlake, its pop-star lead investor.

Hash-tagged channels include #FashionFriday and #twittersdead, featuring fashion parades and users expressing what they do when Twitter goes down, both led off by Timberlake.

Robo.to launched on August 1 and is tiny but growing fast - it had 20,000 active users last month, producing 100,000 videos, which were watched 1.5m times.

Rey Flemings, chief executive of Particle, robo.to’s parent company, says the Web version will move to cell phones through iPhone and Android applications before the end of the year.

“We intend to to be your personal calling card on the web. Restricting the video to four seconds, reduces the social pressure of recording a long YouTube-like video, so you can just express a single emotional idea,” he says.

The photo-avatars on a service like Twitter are disconnected from the content of the tweets, he argues. Robo.to came out of a product called Smirk that encouraged users to update video versions of their avatars.

With its additional features and the slim format, optimised for cell phones, robo.to has a future as a social address book. However, it faces strong competition from services being pushed by handset makers, including Motorola, HTC, INQ and Nokia, and software from Yahoo, Myriad and others.

Particle was founded in 2008 and won funding last October from the Justin Timberlake group of companies, which has also invested in the successful iPhone game developer, Tapulous.

Tags: htc, inq, Motorola, nokia, robo.to, Tapulous, Timberlake, twitter

September 21, 2009 8:09pm in Digital media, Internet, Software | Comment