I‘m rolling my eyes a tiny bit as I write this.
One of the exciting parts of my job is seeking out new social media to tell you about. It’s also the bane of my existence, because, you have to believe me when I say this, I get tons of emails and tweets, etc from people who want me to talk up their new app/network/widget. And most of them…. not completely awesome.
So, I don’t write about 80% of the ones that come my way.
There has been a lot of yammering over the last week about Vine. Nipping hard at the heels of Keek, and capitalizing on the resurgence of animated .gifs, Vine comes to us courtesy of Twitter. It’s a short video messaging app, that allows you to create and share 6-second videos. It works a lot like stop-motion animation: when you hold your finger on the screen, it shoots, and when you take your finger off, it stops. It then sews all the clips together for you, and you can upload it to your account, and then push it to Twitter and Facebook, if you desire.
It seems like everyone is excited about this new app except for me. I find 6 seconds is not enough, but to be fair, I also struggled with the 140 character format of Twitter at the beginning, as well. Beyond that, though, I found the app to be buggy–every time I tried to upload my video, I got an error message, and the video I’d created wasn’t stored anywhere so that I could try again later. I lost several videos I made this way before I managed to upload my first video.
Additionally, I wish there was some way of editing the clips after you shoot them. You are stuck with the clips you have. You can’t shorten them (and when you only have 6 seconds to work with…), and you can’t rearrange them.
I created a little video and was going to embed it here to show you, but there’s no way of grabbing the video’s URL or embed code. The only way you could get the URL of the post is to put it on Twitter and copy it from there. And you can’t share videos that are already on Vine. You can only share videos at the moment of uploading.
It’s become a bit of a joke, but there’s quite a bit of porn on there, as well. Yes, I found some in my travels on Vine, and no, I was not looking for it. I kept thinking “what would happen if my son were looking over my shoulder while I was browsing on here?”
So, I feel like I’m the one person in the world that’s not crowing about how cool Vine is. Yes, there is some really cool stuff on there. But it feels to me like Twitter probably had it in development for a while, and rushed it out the door. It needs work.
Check out this post on Mashable.
Fifteen Brands Already Using Vine
UPDATE: I just found this on The Laughing Squid and had to share:
