Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

Ah...the results of the race to be the "Instagram of Video".

Vine is no different than any number of recent video sharing apps. Vine does nothing new but sets new arbitrary time limits on the videos they support. Just like the others Vine will try to convince you that through focus groups they have found "3 second" videos will revolutionize video sharing and discovery, but this is nothing new.

Examples:

Threadlife: Supports 3 second videos Viddy: Supports 15 second videos Animoto: Supports 30 second videos Klip: Supports 60 second videos

now Vine and its 6 second videos.

I am left wondering, what problem do all these video sharing apps think they are solving by setting arbitrary video time limits? Short videos might increase likelihood a user will sit through a whole video, but contrary to what these apps want you to believe they are not improving content quality through these arbitrary time limits. Further, time limits do not help users discovery quality content, so what problem have any of these apps solved?

The company that is dubbed the "Instagram of video" in the media is going to do the same thing Instagram did, improve content sharing and discovery. Of course, I hope my start up is that company, but even if not I think it is safe to say the company who deserves this title will not get it for setting video time limits as a result of focus groups.

Disclosure: I founded my own video sharing website with the goal to address the current problems with video sharing and discovery. I have done this by making Google Earth the UI for discovery of video content.

Result of artificially constraining an activity by arbitrary parameters can be wildly creative, not to mention hugely lucrative. Think of something like Bollywood - get rid of serious, credibile drama, and replace with mindless 3 hour melodrama with 5 titillating songs per film, your film finds a guaranteed million plus audience, no matter what garbage you churn out:) Intellectual filmmakers in India who fight this market and mindset with "improving content" are very quickly driven to bankruptcy & become Roger Eberts for the local trade publications :))

Programming languages are ultimately an exercise in artificially tying up your arms & asking you to type with your left toe. Try coding a naturally recursive catamorphism in a language that doesn't support recursion. Try storing a billion emails under a megabyte with clever supercompact data structures. Try coding functionally in imperative C. All of these things can & have been done. Why do people do these things ? So also Vine.

Just like I've never been on Instagram, I have no urge to join this site, but your criticism is still misguided.

Placing a constraint on a creative endeavour is a old and time-tested way of tickling creativity. Pre Twitter, people didn't think they could have any kind of meaningful conversations without at least a paragraph of prose. Sure, it's a strained at time, but there's little denying that Twitter has taught a lot of us a lot about getting to the point, quickly.

> people didn't think they could have any kind of meaningful conversations without at least a paragraph of prose

Still can't. (Oh, the irony!)

> Pre Twitter, people didn't think they could have any kind of meaningful conversations without at least a paragraph of prose.

People didn't text and IM before Twitter?

At least, they didn't do in public. IM is also a one-to-one conversation, unlike Twitter.

> Vine does nothing new but sets new arbitrary time limits on the videos they support.

Imposing arbitrary contraints is very common in poetry, which often requires the writer to use a particular verse form, and other creative endeavors[1]. So even if that's all they do, it could be worthwhile.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_writing

I had a similar conversation about this with a friend yesterday instead of comparing it to Instagram - he compared it to YouTube.

I believe the difference between other apps etc is instead of capturing one continuous shot, Vine allows punctuated recording. In other words you can collate a selection of a few snips of video which Vine auto-generates into a longer combined version.

Sure you can do this and upload this to YouTube etc but I haven't seen anyone execute that as well as the Vine team.

However, for it to be successful Twitter (which acquired Vine before launch) doesn't need Vine to have users.

What Twitter needs/wants with Vine is engagement on Twitter (it doesn't necessarily need engagement within Vine, if it does that a bonus) because if there's engagement brands will create Vine's - which Twitter can then monetize.

Sure the app can share to Facebook too, but Twitter's goal with that is to grab your social graph (hence find your Facebook friends which has since been blocked) which then encourages users to "follow" each other on Twitter - again helping it to monetize with advertisers.

Twitter could have done this through encouraging advertisers to create short video ads on YouTube etc instead of Vine but then there is no value for Twitter as they can't tell advertisers how many people saw the video organically or because of the ad.

That's the real goal of Vine, users are just a "bonus".

Although technologically these are videos with a time limit, in terms of how people are using them, I think they're closer to the aesthetic of animated GIFs. If you wanted to recreate what people are doing with animated GIFs (short, looping videos), but with smoother playback, Vine isn't a bad approximation. I forget where I saw it, but someone called it "gifboom for adults" [1].

[1] http://gifboom.com/, a mobile app for taking short videos as animated GIFs, popular among Tumblr users

Yea, well, I really liked this, and I think it's something that I may go back to as a voyeristic peek into the lives of people I will never meet. It feeds these 6 second videos into my brain without me thinking or installing the google earth plugin. I have no interest in seeing 5 minutes of crappy video of someone's boring life, but a 6 second peek is pretty engaging.

> I am left wondering, what problem do all these video sharing apps think they are solving by setting arbitrary video time limits?

Here's a Forbes article on the subject: http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2012/11/29/constrai...

(Meta-)quote: “Recent studies offer evidence that, contrary to popular belief, the main event of the imagination—creativity—does not require unrestrained freedom; rather, it relies on limits and obstacles.”

Another example: TED Talks, which are maximum 18 minutes

If anything needs to grab my attention, 6 seconds is probably overkill. Twitter did it with 140 chars - they're doing it with 3/6 secs whatever.

Hell, C pointers have been doing it with 4 and 8 bytes for ages! :)

The limits do have a big effect on quality, and ease of use of these micro video apps. The idea is to share a quick video, not spend a ton of time filming, uploading and formatting.

And here I was thinking YouTube was the Instagram for video...

iambic pentameter

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