Is Vine Instagram for Video? | Hacker News Reader

Is Vine Instagram for Video?

blog.fredstevenssmith.com

74 pointsfredsters_s64 comments

Vine is the video equivalent of the carefully cropped Facebook photo.

The narcissistic services like Twitter and Facebook haven't really had a video equivalent. By limiting the videos to 6 seconds people will be able to post little videos without requiring the talent or effort to make something longer that people will be willing to watch.

Just as the reddit front page has become dominated by meme images that require little brain power to consume, Vine will ideal for LOL videos posted by people. I suspect it will be very successful.

Also, the OP says "Instagram makes everyone ‘creative’." Seriously?

You're right. The ease of content creation is the initial appeal for the masses. Then those who are or want to be more creative can rise above others, and create consumable content that's clever, entertaining, beautiful, fun, etc..

Yes. People who are creative will use the medium (in this case 6 second videos) in interesting ways. Of course, Vine will highlight those videos as examples of how great the service is.

There's really no difference between this and giving everyone a box of Crayolas: most people will produce crap, a few will be Picasso. The ease of sharing your creation is the key element.

I was never good at crayons. I can definitely hit 'Record' on my phone though and point it at things I find interesting or beautiful, that surely some others will find interest in as well.

If you can do it well, that's quite a talent!

Nothing in the post implies I support this self-curation. I don't. Also, the quotes around 'creative' are instructive.

[Youtube Capture](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/youtube-capture/id576941441?...) for iOS is a pretty remarkable tool for quickly capturing and sharing video as well. I think it's far superior to Vine, especially because it leverages the powerful YT platform while still including FB and Twitter.

I would assume that the same filters from YT in the Browser are coming to the app as well, making it a far more compelling "Instagram for Video".

It's really not about just capturing what's in front of you. That's easy, you can do that with the built in Camera. The only thing this app adds is some sugar around that experience.

The crux of why video isn't like photo is that editing it is so bloody difficult... and the only way you create compelling video is through editing. This app does nothing to help that.

> Also, the OP says "Instagram makes everyone ‘creative’."

Just as alcohol makes everyone funny.

When I saw Vine I instantly thought of Cinegram [1]. Basically it's like Vine but it allows you to selectively animate portions of the video. This leads to lots of hilarious gif-like clips which IMO are much more shareable (and addictive) than Vine.

[1] http://cinemagr.am/

yeah, every day since vine launched I keep thinking, why not GIFs. With the maximum mainsteam acceptance/resurgence of GIFs these days, it seems like cinegram and GIFboom are already doing this. GIFs also embed/shareable etc. Same 6-second capture/edit/post process too. Hmmmm

Like the insights and mostly agree.

I think you missed an interesting point, though:

Can Twitter (or Facebook, or anyone else for that matter) still build the next big thing internally? Are these companies still as 'startup' as they think they are, or are they now too slow and bureaucratic to come up with products unrelated to their own core functionality?

A follow question: should they even come up with the new cool thing, or should they focus on their core offerings and simply buy break out successes when they are apparent?

In my opinion, both FB and Twitter are overestimating their chances here, like any incumbent always does (see Christensen). The questions "what if Google does this" is dismissed by every founder, because obviously Google is too focused on its core mission to make the success of a new social app the forefront of its development efforts.

Both companies are focusing more and more on being platforms for others, rather than building and testing all new paradigms themselves. This is what being the incumbent allows you to do, taking much larger risks, with larger payoffs. Launching a lot of small apps with cool ideas certainly shouldn't be their core business when they need to figure out how to deal with their growing developer ecosystem (again, something both companies are struggling with).

Acting on fear, which both companies did with their recent apps, certainly isn't the right strategy. But maybe I'm wrong and Twitter and Facebook are the only companies that can escape the innovator's dilemma?

BTW - Google is doing fine on that front with self driving cars and rockets, despite their not so apparent track record in social.

I don't think they can, no. But twitter didn't build vine, they acquired it. Can twitter and Facebook acquire the next big thing? Sure :)

Before it's the next big thing? That would mean acquiring all good small startups that are active in _some_ space they are interested in, without waiting for the decision on who's the best. Again, fear does not make good decisions.

Vine is about forcing creativity and curation of the visual world around us. 6 seconds really limits the amount of content you include in order to tell a simple story. The 140 character limit on Twitter, whether purposeful or not initially, also forces this creativity and simplifying a message to give as much meaning possible in as little space possible.

Imagine if Twitter had / was able to acquire Instagram. That, plus Vine, and I'd say Twitter would be on their way to helping rapidly kill Facebook; Now Facebook's death with just be a bit slower, and they may own some more assets that might be worth something.

Totally agree. I'm surprised that Twitter didn't. I wonder what the story behind that is

Maybe it's the billion dollars asking price that got in the way.

It seemed there was resentment from Dorsey after the news was announced. I can't remember exactly what the signal was, but something like deleting his Instagram account.

Twitter actually were willing to offer more than Facebook, but something made Kevin go with Facebook's offer in the end.

I think it was Systrom who made carved out that path for Instagram, and not any reluctance on Twitter's part.

Do you have anything to back this up? Articles etc? I heard lack of liquidity was the issue

I didn't post the link at first, because I couldn't find it in my bookmarks, but I got lucky with my Google search:

    The people familiar with the negotiations said Twitter
    executives were shocked that they had not been given an 
    opportunity[1] to present a counteroffer. They said 
    Twitter was prepared to make higher offers [than $525M].

~ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/technology/instagram-found...

Facebook's $1 billion offer being valid must have been contingent on not seeking a counter-offer.

When people say things like "I thought it would be interesting to unpack Vine’s success so far", what is "success" based on?

Is Vine a "success"/popular? How is this quantified?

It's popular the same way Quora is:

1. People like Techcrunch are talking about it.

2. (...)

3. Success!

Step 1.5: Trendy SV/SF people starting tweeting and blogging about it.

It's a relative term. Vine launched what, a week ago, and already all of us know about it.

That's a pretty loose definition of the term 'success'.

Everyone knowing about it is a big hurdle to get over towards real success, but it's not really success in itself.

I'd be curious to know what numerical value you attribute to success?

Here's an easy way to subjectively understand if something is popular: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23vine&src=typd

Why no mention of Keek in any of these Vine discussions? It's the closest competitor in functionality and has some serious traction in the microvideo space.

Good point. dmor wrote about this yesterday http://refer.ly/is_twitter_s_vine_launch_a_response_to_popul...

One point I didn't explicitly make in the post: Vine is not about gifs, it's about video.

Though I wouldn't be against it if it were gifs really... I kind of like the videos without sound more.

I didn't realize there was audio in Vine until this morning. I always have my phone on mute and didn't think to try the app out with mute off. I prefer it with mute on, specifically because the sound takes away from the experience because it's clips of sound stitched together, which does not sound very nice.

It can also be beautiful though, sound is just another texture to work with. The thing that comes to mind are Wes Anderson's many 'breakfast sequences' where he shows preparation in jump cut 'vine' style

Yeah but that's one hollywood movie, this is every movie.

That was my reaction. When vinepeek.com was posted over the weekend I thought it was fantastic.

It was only later when showing it to my family I realized there was sound, since my laptop is always muted if I'm not actively listening to something on it.

Withou the sound, it was sort of like amazing slice-of-life home movies from all over the world in a neat little mash up of humanity.

With the sound... it was a bunch of videos. Often neat, but somehow less.

Yeah it is an interesting choice. I may be wrong, but when I saw the first Vines shared by Kevin Rose on twitter they were without sound. I think it was a conscious effort to differentiate themselves from gifs, and all the internet baggage that come with them

Hasn't Apple banned it yet? And if not, why not? I find the double standard appalling.

Politics? Apple might be trying to buy Twitter.

It seems as though a lot of App Store features can be quite political. Everything is oriented around US front page position -- it can bring in ~10K downloads a day in the US without much marketing.

In order to endorse content like that however, Apple wants to know that the app can handle the traffic and the server costs. If they know you are a big company, or even a funded startup, it plays a role in the selection process.

I wrote the same thing yesterday. It will be very interesting to see how this battle for video pans out.

http://lukethomas.com/vine-is-for-storytelling/

Hey Luke,

I make a storytelling app, so I've thought a lot about story telling apps in the past. I understand how you see it as a storytelling medium, but do you really think it's an efficient one? A great one? Could you really make a powerful story using Vine? I'm still unsure, but I think they are going to have a pretty hard time conveying a powerful narrative with it.

Here's a couple examples made with our app, would love to hear your thoughts: http://backspac.es/r/sKu44BhXgn, http://backspac.es/r/klfmvMdWD1

Is it another monument to narcissism? Yeah, seems to be.

One question: Was Vine completely cultivated at Twitter? Or was it something they snapped up in very early stages from someone else?

AFAIK no, it was in a fairly late (pre-launch) beta stage before being acquired, and raised a seed round from GV among others (hence Kevin Rose posting Vines when it was still in private beta).

Right - I noticed Rose's Vines go back as far as 130 days. Figured he (and GV) was involved as an investor.

Is there a possibility the whole Vine adult content hiccup was just a publicity stunt?

No. You don't put your relationship with Apple and the App Store at risk for a 'publicity stunt'.

Apple needs to be ban all content-creation related apps if they don't want to be hypocrites and/or a bully.

Interesting question. I'm not sure - it doesn't seem intuitively like Twitter / Dorsey (as far as i can tell Vine is Dorsey's pet project) would stoop to that kind of stuff.

Why is a publicity stunt something low or to be frowned upon?

Well in this case, it exposes many unwilling/unexpecting people to pornography. That probably should be frowned upon.

Simply living on planet Earth in 2013 exposes many to pornography. Like anything we do in life, we have to take responsibility for ourselves. If that means being a jerk to our kids and making sure they don't use vine, then that's what that means. Same thing goes for taking the risk of looking at a video whose contents we aren't totally sure of.

It's just tacky. If I know anything about Dorsey it's that he's allergic to tacky

I believe so. For them an instant thing they could do is just ban certain tags such as #porn and others that still work. I believe it is a calculated thing they are doing. However it does put them at risk of being banned from the App Store like 500px so perhaps not. Perhaps they do not have the resources to deal with the problem.

I don't think they'd want to be involved in censorship.

Banning tags doesn't solve anything. It simply encourages dishonesty and makes it harder to keep track of the unwanted posts.

God no. They had more than enough publicity from the start, being owned by Twitter and all. This has brought them nothing but negative coverage, and a risk of getting kicked off the App Store.

P.S. You're wrong about Google's social efforts bombing. They are filling in a need.

I'd love to see some data that supports what you're saying

You mean other than what Google is reporting active users wise?

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/google-becomes-the-worlds-secon...

Excellent!

Vine is a Privacy nightmare

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