So I finally caved and downloaded Vine last night. It's been sitting in that weird category of apps I keep hearing about but hadn't actually installed, and then Wednesday my coworker Dana wouldn't stop talking about it over lunch (we went to the taco place on 5th again, I had the same three carnitas I always get), so I figured I'd see what the fuss was.
For anyone who's missed it: Twitter put this thing out on the App Store last Thursday, the 24th. It's dead simple. You hold your finger down on the screen to record, lift it up to pause, and it stitches together whatever clips you shot into one continuous six-second loop. No editing after the fact. No trimming, no undo, nothing. Whatever you shot is what you get, forever, looping like a gif that never stops apologizing for itself.
I want to like this more than I do.
The idea is kind of great, honestly. Six seconds forces you to think about what you're actually filming instead of just pointing a phone at something for thirty seconds of nothing. But in practice I spent maybe forty minutes last night trying to make one halfway decent video of my dog Biscuit doing his weird spin-in-a-circle thing before he lies down, and I never got it. Six seconds is either too short to catch the whole spin or too long and you're just staring at him standing there being a dog. There's no forgiveness in the format. You mess up the last half-second of your six and you're starting completely over, because there's no way to just re-shoot the bad part.
Also, and this is a small thing but it bugged me, the app doesn't tell you how much recording time you've got left while you're actually filming. You're just guessing. I ended up counting in my head like I was diffusing something in a movie.
The vertical-only thing is going to be a problem too, I think. Every video looks like it was shot by someone holding their phone up at a concert, because that's basically the only way anyone actually holds a phone when they're not thinking about it. Instagram at least lets you go square. This is just tall skinny video, take it or leave it.
None of which means I'm deleting it. I made one decent clip of the espresso machine at work doing its loud death-rattle thing right before it pulls a shot, and something about the loop actually worked for that: the noise repeating over and over got funnier every time it looped instead of less funny, which isn't how repetition usually works. So there's something here. I just don't think anyone's figured out what to do with it yet, including the people who built it.
Worth saying: this came out the same week everybody was glued to the BlackBerry relaunch stuff, so Vine kind of got buried under that, at least in my feeds. I'm not going to add to the pile on BB10 here. Plenty of people this week are already covering the Z10 and the whole rebrand-from-RIM thing to death, and honestly I don't have a strong take on it beyond "good luck to them." I only bring it up because it's funny that a free six-second video app snuck out the same week as a company betting its whole existence on a phone launch, and one of those things is definitely going to matter more in five years and I'm not totally sure which.
Anyway. If you've got an iPhone and ten minutes, it's free, it doesn't ask for much, and it's kind of fun in the way flipping through an old Viewmaster is fun — brief, a little dumb, weirdly hard to stop doing. I give it a month before people are either obsessed with it or have completely forgotten it exists. Possibly both, in that order.
If anyone else has downloaded it, send me your username. I want to see what other people are doing with the six seconds, because so far my search feed is ninety percent people filming their own feet.