Both ridiculed and adored by many, Twitter and Instagram are the most well-known social media services today that promote quick sharing of content in a stripped down, easily digestible format. Twitter’s reach, as anyone reading The Iron Warrior would be aware, has become so broad that the concept of hashtags and tweets have been engrained in the culture of the masses thanks to the site’s pervasiveness of simplicity. Instagram, often mocked as an image service for hipsters and bad photographers, has become a massive network of over 100 million mobile users, with distinctive square photographs recognizable almost instantly in one’s news feed on Facebook.
Twitter and Instagram started out as complements to one another, as the similar audience and mission of the two services made Instagram the perfect photo sharing companion for tweets. This relationship ended bitterly and abruptly last April when Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion, and the services began cutting mutual ties of support. While Twitter has now partnered with photo editing service Aviary for its basic photo filters (with respect to naming, cohesive branding at its finest), it has been looking at finding new ways of keeping an edge over its large rivals. After purchasing the unreleased video service Vine late last year, Twitter released the Vine app to iPhone users on January 24 as a separate network that integrates well with their own service, likely as a response to increased competition. Mere hours after Vine’s release, and keeping in line with the history of the two companies, a feature in Vine allowing users to find friends from Facebook was blocked, the reason cited being that Vine didn’t appropriately share what it was doing with Facebook.
Vine follows the footsteps of Twitter and Instagram by focusing initially solely on mobile devices. Vine embodies the microsharing concept by having users share 6-second videos, keeping them short enough to share over networks and view in rapid succession but long enough to still allow expression. The website is pretty bare, much like Instagram’s, but in the app there is a flood of unique videos that can be easily sifted through in feed form. Videos shared to Twitter appear in the Twitter cards opened when users open individual tweets.
A quick tutorial when you first install the app gives you a sense for the kind of video sharing Vine is meant for. During the whole 6 second recording, your finger is held down, so the whole screen acts as a record button. When you lift up, the recording stops, allowing you to move locations or change what you’re filming before putting your finger down to record again. Once you share the post, you get popped to a feed of the curated and most popular ones, which you can sift through for hours. Indeed, writing this post I found myself caught up in watching countless seemingly mundane videos, which in themselves would be dull but in quick succession gives you an almost surreal glimpse into the lives of hundreds of ordinary people that you wouldn’t get through carefully curated photos or text-based posts. Some people have taken to reviving stop-motion film, the most popular stop-motion theme being finishing a meal or a drink, which rather stereotypically aligns with how many perceive similar sharing networks. Others will post a clip of the concert they’re at, their pets, their children or a restaurant, which combined gives you a neat view of human life. This is furthered by some videos which show a walk through a street in Delhi or a loud pool party in the Caribbean, giving a glimpse of not only Western culture but that of other places we don’t normally see.
Vine’s policy on content is fairly loose, much like Twitter, which has led to some initial controversy over porn access on the service. Pornographic material was easily searchable by using hashtags as simple as #porn and many others that have likely gone through your head while reading this sentence. A few days after its launch, a short clip of hardcore pornography made it into the Editor’s Pick feed, prompting Twitter to respond by swiftly removing it from the list and claiming it was due to human error that the video was added to the Editor’s Picks. Apple followed by removing the app from its own Editor’s Choice spotlight and made no further mention of it in any other sections of the App Store outside of the automatically-generated Top Charts section. Vine has made some effort to remove access to some content by having no videos show up if porn-related hashtags show up, but users have reported being able to still access old videos by direct link or through user profiles. Commenters on The Verge observed that Vine then still technically allows access to pornographic videos, which is forbidden by Apple’s often unclear App Store guidelines and resulted in photo sharing service 500px being totally removed for a week, returning with a 17+ rating. While the policy itself is clear, how Apple navigates around grey area cases like these where pornography is a result of the nature of the app is unclear, but likely will be figured out more in the future as they run into more similar cases.
As for Vine, the small bump in the service’s launch will likely be overshadowed by the novelty of its video sharing features, and while it’s not the first app to explore this medium of short video sharing, it’s the first one with this level of backing. Facebook conveniently updated its app last week to allow video recording and sharing, mirroring a feature already on its desktop website and undoubtedly in an attempt to curb Vine while it’s still smaller, but there is still potential for Vine to carve out its own niche. It may take a while to catch on, but it looks like Twitter may have snagged the video version of Instagram, and it is fantastic.
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