After the initial shock had somewhat subsided, a backlash from the community began showing in the public timeline. People were hurt that their friends had been let go, seemingly for no apparent reason. The second-had reason given was that Seesmic is “not a content site. It’s a conversation tool.” This is true. It says so right at the top of the homepage. And here’s where I’m going to disagree with most of the people involved in the backlash. Seesmic has always been a conversation tool. There was an experiment where they hired some people to create content for the site. They ran their course, and (I assume) the higher ups at Seesmic decided that the experiment, while somewhat successful, did not fit into their plan, whatever that may be.

There has been a lot of emotion flying around here, with many impulse moves made on the community’s part. I think that’s stupid, and as adults (for the most part) the ability to curb our impulses should have been a part of this. User cphadley posted in a thread that, while we did not contribute to the site in the form of monetary investment, we indeed were “time investors,” having spent many hours making the site’s community what it was. That’s all well and good, but “time investors” don’t pay peoples salaries, and they certainly don’t pay for a backend upgrade. We are a demanding group, we social media early adopters. Loic Lemeur, the CEO of Seesmic, made a business decision, and while very few of us may agree with that decision, it was his to make.

So now we get to the part where people ask about transparency and the plan for Seesmic. Transparency is a great idea, and in an ideal world, we’d know everything about every company’s every decision whenever we want. We, however, live in the real world, where company “secrets” can foster competition. We must ask ourselves, how transparent is too transparent? What we really want to know are the reasons behind the decisions that directly affect us. Now, while we all love Sukhjit and Rachel and appreciate what they brought to the community, their terminations at Seesmic do not directly affect the user base. They will (or at least can) remain a part of the Seesmic user community. But they are the only people directly affected by the decision. So they have the right to know the reasons for termination. Who are we - as mere users who use a free service - to demand transparency? Yes, we could theoretically bring down the company by not using it because of the lack of transparency, but how likely is that to happen? I’d wager not very.

I’ve also seen as part of the backlash a defection of sorts to the competitive service called Phreadz. In full disclosure, I’m also a member of that community, which is quite different from Seesmic, but shares many features. While the CEO of that company may be very happy by this small defection of users to his service, I still don’t see why it’s happening in the first place. Seesmic has had its controversies before, and I stll remained using both services because I like them both, and both have wonderful community bases. So this show of solidarity to me is silly. I still don’t see a reason to leave.

However, Loic does - whether he tells us or not - need to have a business plan. He, of all, people knows this. Loic is an entrepreneur with several businesses under his belt. He should know that in order to have a successful business, he will need a clear plan for this startup to move beyond “startup” and into successful business. Whether we as users know that plan is irrelevant. How many services do we use on a regular basis in our everyday lives where we don’t know the plan? Why do we demand to know the plan of a free service that still claims to be in “alpha” stage? Granted, it would be nice to know if the time that we’ve put into building this community will be worth it in the future, but from a business standpoint, that would be shooting yourself in the foot. 

NOT having a plan of any kind, however, is a disaster. I know this first hand from one of my former jobs. I was placed on assignment at AT&T Tech Channel, an online video channel focused on interenet security and technology news and information. When I began there in 2005, I was the first production person they hired, and they had little more than a conference room and an idea. I helped to build what amounted to 3 fully-functional television studios, put in many hours of hard physical and mental work, and contributed as many ideas to the project as I could. All that I and my colleagues asked was that we have a business plan to model our efforts on. We need to know things like our audience demographic, the type of programming we’d put on the channel, the style of shows - hell, even a logo would have been nice! We went through It took us months just to figure out a name for the thing, and even when we found a name for the network, we were told we couldn’t use it by the Legal, Marketing, and PR departments. We were months into the project and back to square one.

I won’t go much more into the blunders that were made there, but I will say this: Had we a clear and concise plan from the very start, the Tech Channel would not have folded earlier this year after several rounds of layoffs and people quitting out of frustration. Remember, a plan is a guide. While the plan can certainly change and evolve as time goes on, having one in the first place is a responsibility the company has to its employees and monetary investors.

So the calls for Loic to reveal a plan to the users…not his responsibility. It should certainly be revealed to his employees and investors, but we are owed nothing as users. Sure, it would be nice to know what’s going on, but we don’t deserve it simply for using the service. I’ve yet to be convinced otherwise. I came in to Seesmic as an alpha tester, with the knowledge that I would occasionally offer up things I thought would be nice to have in the service. Whether Seesmic listens to my thoughts is its prerogative.

So now I say, as members of a community, let’s help two fellow members who have recently been laid off to find new jobs fitting of their abilities and skills. It’s the least we can do as community members.