LiveTyping – Excellent Idea for Bloggers Who Don’t Know What To Write on Their Blogs

Today I have bumped into yet another cute little startup from the category “cute but what for?” but I could not resist covering it here because even though it will hardly solve any problem for you, it will at least make a few people around you smile - which probably is exactly the goal.

The startup is LiveTyping and it does exactly what the name suggests: it turns the boring written text into a real process of typing for absolutely anyone to see all the typos you make in the process of typing (and correct later). So the boring static texts turns into a small video showing anyone willing to read how exactly you wrote this or that piece.

When you first enter LiveTyping, it offers you a text field where you are invited to type whatever you want and it will record the text (along with all the typos, deleted letters, new versions, etc.) to display the entire process of typing later. You can choose the text to be displayed at a fast or low speed or exactly with the speed you typed it initially to make it look more realistic.

Once you are done typing, you can grab the link to the animated picture or a code to paste in a blog post, sidebar widget or discussion forum. Of course a text displayed in this manner will attract more attention than the usual static (I guess it must be “dead” here) texts that we see around the web.

While it is difficult to see the purpose for this startup right away, I still see some opportunities for it. First of all, where I see it used is in the blogosphere for when the bloggers have nothing really clever or useful or witty to say, we can choose to write totally boring content and type it in LiveTyping so that no one will pay attention to the actual text but will look at how you typed it instead.

The problem here is that if you want search engines to send visitors to your blog from results pages, it will hardly work because images are not exactly SEO-friendly (and LiveTyping generates the text as animated GIFs).

But of course there are other - less pragmatic and more romantic - uses for the small LiveTyping application. Like, what could be better than writing a romantic letter to someone important showing exactly how difficult it was for you to shape your love in words. Honestly, unlike simple static texts, such “alive” texts are a pleasure to watch in themselves and a romantic letter written like this will obviously be read and reread again.

So even if you are like me and understand that this will hardly become a hugely popular application and also that the ads they intend to monetize the application with are a little distracting and will hardly be clicked on, I think it won’t hurt bookmarking it for the future - just in case you want to send a romantic letter or a virtual birthday card… or have nothing to say in a your next blog post.