Apologies for the lack of words from myself, this is due to the fact that I have been on a very overdue vacation. Although a well earned holiday can be bliss just after the hectic Christmas period it can also hold downsides in this line of work. For example, whilst I cut myself off from the rest of civilisation a new social tool decided to surface and leave me in the trail of dust when I arrived home, it’s called Vine and personally I am a little unsure.
If you have not heard of Vine then please let me drag you from under your rock and bring you up to speed. Vine is a micro-video sharing service owned by the good folks over at twitter. Following in the footsteps of twitpic and twitvid it allows users to upload a clip with the maximum duration of 6 seconds and share it with their followers. At first glance it seems as though this is just a service for people to showcase their quick speed cooking skills however some have managed to be rather creative with the app.
Steak tartare in six seconds. vine.co/v/bOIqn6rLeIDvia @dhof
— dick costolo (@dickc) January 23, 2013
Ok so twitter may well be the fastest growing social networking platform today, we are all mad for it and it has the capability of sharing text and image down to a t but video I feel is another matter. It’s a little early to tell whether the app could be a blessing or a hindrance for the viral world, but as this tool pairs quick fire video footage with a fast growing social network then it could well be the perfect way to catch a quick clip of your friend trying to recreate Knoxville & Co’s antics and publish the ‘go wrong’ moment to your own personal twitter feed. On the other hand this app seems to have a limited explicit content filter as proved by the porn scandal yesterday. What’s to stop Joe Bloggs uploading whatever the heck he wants!
The online social world may currently be giddy over the 6 second craze and I am pretty sure there is a straight love hate divide between those that use the new app to cram everything into the smallest amount of time allotted and those that downloaded the app, signed up and then deleted it, I am sadly part of the latter selection of individuals…for the time being.