The history of the next big thing in digital goes back to the earliest days of the consumer Internet and probably started with the denizens of South Park in San Francisco. In the early to mid-90s a discussion thread on The Well, an underground BBS located on a houseboat in Sausalito, gave rise to Wired Magazine, which in turn lead to amongst other things, Hotwired, the Banner ad, the search engine, and an innumerable number of waiters and waitresses finally getting the chance to use their Liberal Arts degree professionally.
Nowadays the next big thing tends to rise up from a well executed startup, by capturing the attention of a few hundred thousand digerati, and then going mainstream via a round of ostentatious funding or a high profile acquisition.
Case in point the darlings of 2012 were Instagram and Pintrest, both of whom started small and caught fire rather quickly. Instagram, of course, made headlines for being, what, at the time was thought to be a billion dollar acquisition by Facebook — prior to the company having made a single cent. Of course, big companies buy hot little start ups for more than just revenue. They want the team, the developers, and the cachè that sparked the digerati interest in the first place.
This year the first candidate seems to have bubbled up to the front of the NBT class, although it isn’t a start up anymore, having been quickly snapped up by Twitter while still in relative infancy. That said, it’s still an interesting social newcomer in it’s own right, and as more people catch on, it may well be as influential as the Twitter folks predicted. The app in question here is called Vine, and yes, it is kinda awesome.
Where Instagram was a feed of pictures, and its uniqueness was in the variety of filters, Vine is a feed of looping six second videos. There have been other apps that have wanted to rise to rise out of the social video clip battle royal, but Vine just might leave them all behind because, simply put, Vine is really clever.
Having played with it for about a week there are three smart elements that I think set it apart from its competition. Firstly, the videos are only six seconds long by rule. That may seem short, but as our national attention span continues to dwindle, and we all grow impatient with pre-roll ads and intro bumpers, somehow, by itself, six seconds feels just right. Secondly, the video loops. This extends that six second video to infinity, therefore makes the poster have to think through their composition much more than just a quick clip alone. Lastly, the third piece of genius that comes with Vine is the fact that the six seconds do not have to be filmed all at once. Pressing and holding anywhere on the screen begins recording, and lifting your finger pauses. So, you can change the angle, change the scene, or even compose everything as a stop motion animation. Your only cap is the six second limit.
If you have an iPhone you should try it for yourself. It’s about to be the next big thing.
Thoughts on “App Trendspotting: Vine”
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I am really enjoying Vine so far but I think it has some inherent limitations that make it distinctly different from and less sticky than Instagram. With Instagram it is easy for just about anyone to look like a rockstar and produce a photo people enjoy seeing. Vine takes much more vision and work to produce something particularly engaging and I think this will pan out to become prohibitive to many both from av viewing AND producing perspective. I am still not really sick of filtered cat and food photos on IG (though I know many am) but have already grown a little tired of cat and driving and making coffee videos on Vine which is interesting to me. I think this may produce a more elite sort of social network with many observers or a cluttered network where people make a lot of noise. I’m REALLY interested to see how it pans out!