Fresh off the Vine – Twitter’s Move into Video

First, 140-characters.  Then geo-location.  Pictures.  And now?  Video.  Six-seconds worth, to be precise.

The Vine App interface. Source: https://vine.co/blog

Introducing Vine, Twitter’s mobile video sharing app.  It allows users to record, edit, and share 6-seconds worth of looping noteworthy, mundane, or even NC-17 rated content to their Twitter feed or just the Vine community.  Brought three weeks ago into the social sphere, Vine has been touted as the elevation of social video: simple, concise, and integrated.  Let it be known that Vine is not the first or the most innovative social video service around – SocialCam, Viddy, and Light have all tapped into the market well in advance, with their own unique offerings from Instagram-esque filters to audio manipulation.  But they weren’t bought by Twitter. They didn’t have a built in audience of 200 million active users.  They didn’t have a rush of users the first day, including coverage from top media, celebrities, and thousands of “Hey, I’m using vine” tweets.

Now, on to the good stuff: Did the NC-17 comment catch your attention? Great, because it’s caught the media’s.  Like with any newly popular trend, the porn industry is on top of Vine (NSFW), using its service to share content that is normally regulated to questionable hotel rooms across America.  But that in itself is not news.  Porn is an industry of adaptation – they take over Twitter trends daily, spambot key words, post explicit TwiPics like there is no tomorrow. The difference?  As Vine is not integrated into the Twitter interface but rather lives as a separate App, Vine has been labeled with a 17+ restriction in Apple’s App Store.   A deterrent?  Maybe.  An easily avoided deterrent by simply claiming to be 17+?  Yes, indeed.   Vine has already banned certain hashtags like #porn and #sex to ease the findability of adult content, as well as adding the new restriction.

If anything, this rating may charge Twitter to do what it did with geo-location and photos: integrate.  From a brand perspective, integration is simplification – if a community manager can post from a single account they are more likely to use the service regularly.  Facebook did it with Instragram.  Google did it with YouTube.  No one enjoys a spreadsheet of passwords – integrate!

So: Will you Vine today?  Anyone who responds with a 6-second Vine gets a 140-character soliloquy that you can loop indefinitely.

–@Mercurek

Kristen Mercure

CMGT 541, A