by Matt Honan
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
The very best things we make are the things that allow us to make even better things: tools that create connections and empower creativity. The latest of these is Vine, Twitter’s remarkable new video sharing app.
Vine lets people shoot and share six-second looped videos. It sounds boring, I know. It sounds like Socialcam or Viddy or any number of Instagram-for-video attempts. It’s not. It’s fundamentally different. And it’s amazing.
Vine shares more with the animated GIF than YouTube, and almost doesn’t feel like a video app at all. It is its own thing. It’s a code that unlocks creativity in six-second bursts, a powerful tool for real-time journalism, an entirely new art form.
And after spending a week with it, I’m convinced it’s going to be big. Really, really big.
What’s most interesting about Vine is what’s not there. There’s no way to edit your footage, no filters, no red “record” button. No play button, even. It’s touch to shoot; scroll to play. That makes it incredibly information-dense, like Facebook’s news feed or Twitter’s stream. Everything is signal or skip.
Like Twitter and Instagram, it’s built on constraints. It makes edits for you, stitching your shots together in sequential order with no way to reorder or trim footage. You can’t upload a video from your camera roll or add external audio — it’s ambient sound only. Videos are square and low-definition. And they always loop back on themselves again and again and again. In that respect Vine taps into the culture of the animated GIF, something that has flourished in the last few years as a means of expressing complex ideas and emotions. Vine is a real-time GIF generator, with sound.
One of the most telling things about Vine is it hasn’t been fully integrated into Twitter’s current apps. Vine could have been, simply, a feature in Twitter. Twitter has typically incorporated previous purchases — Tweetie and Summify come to mind. But Twitter, which is leveraging Vine and piggybacking on its own network, gave the app a life of its own because it is a fundamentally new and different thing entirely. Merging the networks didn’t make sense. Being interested in seeing someone’s videos does not necessarily mean you’re interested in hearing what they have to say.
Vine has obvious problems. Like everything else online, it has porn. Porn is everywhere. I get that. But Vine’s porn popped up unexpectedly, in inappropriate places like the “popular” feed and, in one case, the editors’ picks. That’s bad. No one should see a penis unless you want to see a penis.
Vine lacks some basic features too. It needs a better linking method, for example. People-discovery is a mess, especially since Facebook quickly blocked Vine from using its social graph. You can’t block people, so trolls are rampant. You can’t edit titles or tags or comments once your video is posted. And you can’t go back later and export your videos to Twitter or Facebook. Twitter is working on fixing all of these things. It already removed the ability to search for videos tagged as porn. A sharing fix should be imminent.
So if Vine feels a bit rushed, that’s because it is.
“You reach a point where you want to see how the world’s going to use it,” Michael Sippey, Twitter’s VP of product, told Wired.
And that’s what’s so nuts about Vine and convinces me that it’s going to be huge. People are already using it in all sorts of amazing ways. Within a week of its launch, it’s already generating its own culture. People use Vine to make unexpected art, document precious moments and participate in memes. (And, you know, to troll.)
We’ve already seen it used to commit minor acts of journalism. When a broken water main shut down Fifth Avenue in New York, people documented it on Vine. Long before San Francisco officials explained why trains had quit running during the morning commute, a Vine video showed a broken-down train in a station. It was quickly picked up by local media.
This creativity has jumped its own walls. Vinecats.com gives you glimpses of cat videos. Vinepeek.com provides a raw look at everything being uploaded, in real time. We’re going to see more of this. A lot more.
Speaking of cats, Vine has in the span of just a few days generated its own hashtag-heavy tropes. The #magic videos of things crawling across a desktop can’t go on much longer, right? (Right?) And Vine has of course been overrun with videos of food, except now we’re treated to glimpses of what people are making, not what they’re eating.
That, of course, is the big knock against Vine. Like Twitter and Instagram before it, it’s easy to denounce Vine as banal. But when a plane landed in the Hudson River or Tahrir Square erupted in violence, the very things once widely considered narcissistic diversions were accepted, and then embraced, as powerful tools for rapidly distributing information and shaping public opinion.
Vine will have its Tahrir Square moment, and soon. It is destined to be a horrifying window that opens on a violent, capricious world, and to loop it back upon itself. And when celebrities flock to it — as they already are — it will almost certainly one day document the precious real-time birth of our newest Kardashian, on repeat, again and again.
Mat Honan is a senior writer for Wired's Gadget Lab and the co-founder of the Knight-Batten award-winning Longshot magazine.
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