So Twitter's new video thing, Vine, showed up in the App Store on Thursday, and by Friday morning my Twitter feed was already wall to wall with six-second clips of people's dogs, coffee cups, and one extremely dedicated guy doing stop-motion Legos. I wanted to try it the second I heard about it. Then I remembered I carry a Galaxy Nexus, and Vine is iOS only for now, so that plan died pretty fast.
I ended up texting my friend Priya, who has an iPhone 5 and approximately zero patience for my tech curiosity, and made her let me mess with it over drinks on Friday night. Twenty minutes, three test videos, and one video of her cat knocking a pen off the counter later, I think I get what people are excited about, and I also think the excitement is going to curdle fast for a specific reason I'll get to.
The good part first. The interface is genuinely clever. You hold your finger on the screen to record and lift it to pause, so you're basically stop-motion editing in real time without any menus or timelines or export settings. No filters to fuss over, no fifteen options for how square your video should be. You point, you tap-and-hold, you're done in six seconds whether you like it or not. It's the opposite of Instagram in that sense - Instagram wants you to fuss over a single still image for two minutes picking between Valencia and X-Pro II. Vine doesn't give you time to be precious about it.
That's also the problem, honestly. Six seconds is a weirdly punishing limit. It's long enough that you feel like you should be telling some kind of story, but short enough that almost nothing you attempt actually works. Priya tried to film herself making a sandwich, in miniature, cut into six one-second stop-motion beats, and it looked like nothing, just blurry bread moving around. I've seen people online already getting genuinely inventive with the looping bit, since it auto-loops instead of just stopping, but for every clever one there are about forty of somebody's feet walking down a sidewalk.
I keep comparing it in my head to Viddy and Socialcam, the fifteen-second video apps that were the "next big thing" over the summer and that I now basically never open. Fifteen seconds felt like plenty of rope to hang yourself with creatively. Six seconds is almost a dare. I don't think that's an accident - Twitter clearly wants something that fits its whole personality, quick, disposable, built for scrolling past ninety of them in a row rather than sitting and watching one. Whether that's a genuinely new format or just a neat production constraint that gets old in three weeks, I honestly don't know yet. Ask me again in March.
One thing that bugged me right away: there's no way to upload existing video, only record fresh inside the app. I get why - it keeps the whole feed feeling like "this just happened," the way Instagram originally didn't let you upload from your camera roll either. But it also means if you missed the moment, you missed it, and on a phone you're not always holding at the right second, that's going to be most moments. My cat, for the record, does not perform on command, and Vine is not going to change that about her.
No Android yet, no word on when, which stings a little since I'd guess a decent chunk of Twitter's actual user base is on Android phones just going by market share numbers I've seen floating around. Twitter's been cagey about a timeline, which is the same story with a lot of their app rollouts lately, iOS gets the toy first and everyone else waits.
I'll probably end up buying an old iPod touch just to mess around with this properly instead of mooching off Priya every weekend, which is a slightly absurd amount of money to spend on a six-second video toy, but here we are. That's basically how every gadget purchase in this apartment gets justified at this point.