Yesterday Twitter introduced its own micro video sharing service: Vine. Using an app for iPhone or iPad touch you can now easily create a short (stop-motion) video that is immediately integrated into a tweet.
Trending topic
After the introduction yesterday I of course saw a lot of activity from my fellow “Twitter/social media nerds”. list to data A short investigation by Obi4Wan showed that within a few hours about 400 Vine tweets had been sent in the Netherlands. This morning Vine was, as expected, a trending topic.
Vine is an iOS application that lets you easily create a short video that you can share directly to Twitter. It's another step by Twitter toward more functionality for their platform. While Vine is technically a standalone app that also lets you share videos with other Vine users, it's clear that Vine is primarily focused on sharing videos via Twitter. Vine is owned by Twitter, and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was the first to post a run-of-the-mill "Twideo" on Twitter to introduce Vine to the general public. (It wouldn't have been my first example as CEO, but that's besides the point.)
6 second animated gifs
With Vine you don't make professional videos, but animated gifs: short films that are repeated in a loop. You have 6 seconds to record this video. Not too long, which is why it is also called a 'micro video sharing' service. The advantage of the app is that you can record multiple short pieces within these 6 seconds. By holding your finger on the screen you record and when you take your finger off the screen the recording stops. This way you can record multiple short pieces in a row, with or without sound. Vine then merges these pieces into a 6-second video.