Just when you thought you had a handle on the social media scene, up crops a new platform to master. Meet Vine, a social app where you can browse through six-second long videos from your friends and others you follow. The videos loop continually, and you can scroll vertically through them just like your Facebook news feed.
Here’s how to make a video: You hold your finger down to record, and lift it up to stop. You can do this as many times as you want until the six seconds of footage is full.
Like Instagram, Vine is another way to capture a snapshot of the human experience, six seconds at a time. Although it doesn’t seem like it, a lot of visual content can be shared in such a short time. People use Vine to share what they’re doing, like Instagram (“Hey, I was out doing this fun thing with these fun people”), but it is also increasingly used to record and share practical jokes or just funny videos. Another popular Vine category is optical illusions, like watching a cookie magically disappear from a plate.
Vine links with Facebook and Twitter, so you can follow friends from those networks. And of course, like Instagram, you can “Like” and comment on friends’ videos. The video will repeat until you scroll down past it.
Since Vine’s January launch under the Twitter umbrella, it has enjoyed remarkable popularity, especially with high schoolers. It’s one of the top free apps in the iTunes store currently, outpacing SnapChat and Google Maps. It’s only available for iOS at the moment.
I see Vine’s appeal; the potential for humor and creativity is high because of the video format. It’s easy to get lost scrolling through videos and wandering through a compressed, handheld YouTube. But another social media platform to follow? Ugh. If it were up to me, I would add a video option to Instagram and call it a day.
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