Vine – An Official Review of The Nation’s #1 Free App
The official Tripepi Smith review of the new video app Vine, in exactly 140 characters:
New video app creates 6-second “movies” that can be easily shared, but nothing worth sharing fits in a 6-second clip. Believe us, we looked.
This January, the folks over at Twitter debuted their latest acquisition – an app for smart phones called Vine. The software uses your phone’s built-in camera to take video snippets, up to six seconds long. The initial launch was mired in scandal when some particularly racy content was accidentally tagged as an “Editor’s Pick,” but that hasn’t stopped the app from rocketing to the top of the list of popular free apps.
Unfortunately, life’s truly interesting or funny moments (the bits of life worth capturing on camera) generally happen in an instant, and can’t be easily reproduced – a political gaff at the podium, for instance. Given the set up of the average smart phone, by the time one is able to wake their phone up and launch the Vine app, whatever unique occurrence that seemed worth capturing has long since ended.
Of course there are exceptions, and adorable snippets of babies and kittens abound, but real news doesn’t happen in six seconds. While Twitter has proven that important, even revolutionary news can in fact be reported in successive 140 character bursts (the Arab Spring comes to mind), a six second video of civil war could hardly hope to capture the reality. In a world that is turning increasingly to images, Vine actually reenforces the power of well-chosen words.
We can certainly see the potential entertainment factor for teenagers killing time, but we don’t see Vine as the wave of the future in terms of news. The one (and only) good example of legitimate content we found was the teaser trailer for the upcoming movie “The Wolverine.”
Now, this is a movie your humble author has actually been looking forward to, but not because of this teaser. Frankly, I had to watch it about 15 times (which, granted only took a minute and a half) before I could even really digest the images it contains.
Of course, it’s possible that at the ripe old age of 35 I’m just too much a dinosaur to appreciate Vine. Maybe, as attention spans are whittled even further toward nothing, six whole seconds might seem like all a person needs, but for now I’ll log this as novelty and stick to 140 well carefully considered characters.