Now I know when you first check out Vine you are going to think 'wow', these six second videos are just terrible. Within 30 seconds I have seen a shonky bar band, cooking, lip syncing, mindless screaming, cooking yet again and finally, a rather unanimated cat. Wait, give it another six seconds.
Vine is a social video network that allows users to create and share six second videos. The videos loop like an animated GIF with the added benefit of sound. It has the same short and snappy spirit of Twitter.
Tech writers have somewhat mixed opinions of Vine. Mat Honan from Wired said that “after spending a week with it, I’m convinced it’s going to be big. Really, really big”, whereas Jesus Diaz from Gizmodo prophesises the exact opposite, “I don’t get Vine. I don’t give a looping crap about it”.
Personally, I‘m excited about this confusion as it means that no one knows what Vine is really for. This can only be a good thing as it reminds me of exactly what was being said when Twitter first launched and that turned out well.
As documented in the 2012 Fall/Winter Cassandra report, we are seeing more and more web users moving from passive consumers to active curators and now to proactive creators. Harlem Shake anyone?
When tools are simple and provide the ability for users to be creative we get success stories like Instagram. There have clearly been previous attempts to build a social video network but with Vine users posting over 113,000 videos the other weekend it looks like Vine might just have cracked the formula.
Vine is most likely going through a similar teething phase that Twitter went through. Volumes of mindless content of interest to nobody, and functionally much harder to use than it should be, but this is still early days.
From a very similar starting point, Twitter matured and continues to see impressive growth, and I’m going to stick my head out and predict Vine will do the same. Even as I have watched Vinepeek for the past half an hour I have seen some impressive stuff. I was in the mosh pit of the Maccabee concert, I have seen clever stop motion animation and I sat in the front row of a basketball game.
By far the most exciting element of Vine has been seeing users simply experimenting with the platform. Constraints cause creativity to thrive and Vine has plenty of constraints, so expect brilliance. As Adam Savage from Mythbusters said when solving a problem or creating something new: the bigger the time constraint the more likely the solution will be innovative, elegant, and shockingly simple. That’s the key. Vine creates the rules, provides the tools and the results are already impressive.
Now I am meant to finish by explaining how we can use Vine to help brands. A few have already had a go at it but there is no book of best practice yet. In one form or another, Vine or not, it is a natural evolution that as video becomes democratised, in the same way as still images have, a social video network will develop, become increasingly popular and so advertisers will need to be there. We need to be thinking and experimenting with it to figure it out sooner rather than later.
If Vine fails as the next big thing at least it still does what the internet does best, cats.
Robert Bellamy
Trainee Strategist
UM