Twitter's Vine App Ready To Bomb Internet With GIF-Like Videos

Nerval's Lobster writes "Twitter has rolled out Vine, a free app for iOS devices that allows users to shoot and post short videos. Twitter's strategic focus on brevity—the company has long resisted calls to lengthen Tweets beyond the current 140-character limit—extends to Vine videos, which can only be six seconds in length. 'Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger,' Dom Hoffman, Vine's co-founder and general manager, wrote in a blog posting. 'They're little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.' It's easy to see the Vine acquisition as part of Twitter's larger push into multimedia. The company launched a muscled-up photo service Dec. 10, complete with Instagram-style filters and editing tools. That photo launch came on the heels of an escalating battle with Instagram, the Facebook subsidiary, which decided to disable photo integration with Twitter; that same month, Yahoo also decided to jump into the fray with a new Flickr app for iPhone, complete with special filters and the ability to post images to various social networks."

Comments

bomb the internet?

[YrWrstNtmr]

No. It will bomb Twitter. Those of us who don't use twitter will never see or worry about these 6 second clips.

Re:bomb the internet?

[YrWrstNtmr]

On Twitter I can actually interact with celebrities directly...

Ok, why?

Re:bomb the internet?

[Firehed]

What? No. A large number of the high-profile celebrity twitter accounts are run by a social media manager, same as on facebook.

Re: bomb the internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because the celebrity's intern is authorized to tweet on his owner's behalf.

Re:bomb the internet?

[Jonah Hex]

You folks are thinking of the wrong celebrities, I'm talking about the real people like Kevin Smith (@thatKevinSmith), Bruce Campbell (@GroovyBruce), William Shatner (@WilliamShatner), Warren Ellis (@warrenellis), and many more who tweet and respond themselves. I guess I just don't follow the kind of people who don't do their own Twitter. - HEX

Re:bomb the internet?

[Algae_94]

On Twitter I can actually interact with celebrities directly

What do you mean "interact". Tweeting at a person you don't know is the equivalent of saying (or maybe yelling) something at them as they walk by in a public place. Celebs don't really do the public interactions very well as it is, so why would they interact with something that is far easier to ignore / delete?

with thousands of people talking to them, you're lucky if they notice what you say.

Re:bomb the internet?

[Runaway1956]

"On Twitter I can actually interact with celebrities directly"

Has it ever crossed your mind that you could just get a life, instead? WTF does a celebrity have to say that could possibly interest me? I visit Sodahead occasionally. A vast majority of the posts/surveys are mindless drivel about people that I simply don't give a damn about. If a catastrophe took them all out tomorrow, I'd never miss any of them. The headline would catch my eye, and I'd go "Awww, that's a shame." Ten minutes later, I'd forget about them.

Re:bomb the internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simon Pegg called me a dolt on twitter. It was awesome.

Re:bomb the internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because they respond to some tweets personally doesn't mean they even see most of them. I doubt Smith, Campbell, etc. get all that many Tweets, but someone like Shatner would spend every waking moment reading Twitter if he didn't use an intern or some kind of automatic filter to sort them.
I've heard a lot of Celebs mention in interviews that they don't really "read" their Twitter, they just kind of scan the pages of posts every so often and sometimes one post "jumps out" at them and they might respond. But the people who follow them and make claims like yours and the GP are under the illusion that those people are actively hunched over their mobile devices feverishly consuming everything their fans say. Which is probably true for the idiot celebrities like the Kardashians and Snookie who don't actually DO anything worthwhile.

Re:bomb the internet?

[webmistressrachel]

If you're chatting up people who are, or are who purport to be, teenage girls, and those teenage girls couldn't fairly, decently or naturally be referred to by others as YOUR peers, then I'm glad the desk sergeant is doing his job.

Also, I read it wrong at first - I actually warmed to the idea of being chatted up online by a Sarge, then I read it again and got the context correct from the bust bit...

Re:bomb the internet?

[sortius_nod]

Some of us don't just use Twitter to stalk celebrities. I personally use it for political commentary, getting blog hits (I don't run ads, so no, not for revenue), & getting news before news websites get it.

It's probably the most powerful medium for journalists & bloggers.

That being said, I don't see Vine as adding anything to Twitter, nor do I see it being taken up in a hurry. I'll give it a go, but I don't think I'll rush out & "Vine" everything I see.

Re:bomb the internet?

[Charliemopps]

The fact that you give a fuck about interacting with celebrities is precisely why your opinion doesn't matter.

Re:bomb the internet?

[Jonah Hex]

Interesting that people are assuming that I'm only using it to stalk celebrities; most of my use is free form discussion, latest news, and of course talking with other creative folks both famous and not so famous. Not directed at you some of the ACs: Twitter isn't supposed to be continuously read, of course no one is going to read all the tweets that mention them, and people shouldn't be trying to read every tweet by their favorite celebrities. You look at the stream as it goes by, you don't obsess over it. - HEX

Re:bomb the internet?

[Alien Being]

Shatner needs 140 characters just for whitespace.

Re:bomb the internet?

[SuricouRaven]

How do you know that? A good manager is indistinguishable from the real thing, except for never saying anything offensive, legally dubious, or that could be seen as endorsing a product. Something no sensible celebrity would do. The only way I can imagine to know with any degree of reliability that a celebrity account is real and not filtered by their PR agent would be if they said something so monumentally stupid that no PR agency could possibly allow it - and I'm talking 'Blame the jews for ruining the economy' or 'If this law passes, I'm going to haul my gun to Washington and shoot Obama' level of dumb.

Re:bomb the internet?

[Prokur]

On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog

Re:bomb the internet?

[Certhas]

Twittering is not, can not be discussion in ant meaningful sense of the word. It's throwing soundbites back and forth.

Re:bomb the internet?

[thewolfkin]

As for the video service, it's probably going to fail pretty hard. People can get used to posting within a word limit, but most idiots with a cell phone take a good 10 seconds just to get the camera pointed at what they're trying to film. Just look at youtube for examples, 6 seconds is far too short... they'll need at least 30 seconds to a full minute to make it work.

I support a short limit for EXACTLY that reason. Twitter taught people to be brief. While you CAN tweet a long thought in 5 rapid fire tweets it's not worth the effort usually. So you just shorten and let it go. YouTube is an example of why we need to give limits. I mean people post 15 minute clips of something that took less than 7 to say. I still think YouTube should institute a policy of making people watch their own videos before posting them. Even if it's just for the lowest ranked videos or something. or maybe people below a certain activity marker.. or whatever. 30 seconds would be 12 seconds of fumbling... :sigh: well who knows maybe 6 IS too short. Especially since that's probably from the start. What you should get is maybe 20 seconds total of record time and then posting 6 but that would just confused the target audience so... nah.

Re:bomb the internet?

[thewolfkin]

I use twitter like ICQ. it's a way to converse with my community asynchronously. That's my active purpose with twitter. I talk to fellow CAGs. Passively yeah I get urgent news from twitter and general news from "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me"

Re:bomb the internet?

[thewolfkin]

i disagree. it's maybe not the best medium for discussion but if you've mastered brevity it can and does work.

6 seconds?

[olsmeister]

I guess you should be able to sext^H^H^H^Hfilm something in that length of time.

Re:6 seconds?

[RedHackTea]

OK, I have to ask... What is ^H^H^H^H? Backspaces?

Re:6 seconds?

[chronokitsune3233]

Indeed. ^H is a shortened form of Ctrl-H (C-H for those Emacs lovers). Since H is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, it corresponds to ASCII character code 0x08: the backspace (BS) control code. A horizontal tab was code 0x09, so when you press the tab key or use the "\t" escape in strings in a programming language, you're actually sending that control code. Of course, that's mostly ancient history now for most. Keyboard manufacturers, Assembly programmers and hardware driver creators come to mind as the few who might actually need to know such information...

Unicode++;

Re:6 seconds?

[SuricouRaven]

Short version: In certain circumstances, rarely encountered on modern operating systems but once frustratingly common, pressing backspace would not be recognised and instead give you a ^H symbol. Worse, under very specific circumstances the backspace might be recognised by the OS (erasing a character on screen) but passed as ^H to the application - from the user's perspective, all works, but really their typoes and erased sentences are getting recorded as part of whatever document they are writing.

I have encountered it myself only once, when connected via serial terminal with the wrong termtype set. Back when serial terminals were common this was a very easy mistake to make, but serial terminals today are confined only to hardware configuration ports and occasionally access-of-last-resort on servers.

Re:6 seconds?

[lurker1997]

It's OK to ask (although you probably could have looked it up) and I understand that younger people might not know this, but it's pretty sad to me that his has been modded up. I think it says something about the way the userbase of slashdot has changed.

Re:6 seconds?

[RedHackTea]

I was mainly asking because it's odd to me in this context. I assume that he's backspacing over the F word? I had never seen a /.er do this before...
And, my comment got modded up funny, not informative/interesting/etc. So the mod just thought I was a stupid n00bl3t -- which I am this time!

Re:6 seconds?

[blivit42]

Back in the early to mid 90's, when I was in undergrad and using several different unix platforms (AIX, HP-UX, SunOS, Linux, DEC-OS, dumb X-terminals, etc.), different programs on different platforms treated backspace as different things. The talk/ntalk/ytalk command on HP-UX was especially annoying. It would interpret the backspace key as a ^C and kill your talk connection to your buddy across the country using his unix account to chat with you. Imagine typing away, then hitting the backspace key to fix a typo, only to have your connection killed. Sometimes shift-backspace worked (HP-UX, ftp clients, various login prompts), sometimes DEL (usually easy to fix by setting the terminal variable and/or tset), but ^H almost always worked like it should. I believe on a dumb X-terminal on my desk that I had to use to connect to a Sun server during early graduate school, ^H was the only way I could figure out how to actually issue a backspace. So, in agreement with what other posters have said, ^H isn't really important anymore. Not like it was in days of yore, when there were MANY different ways to issue a backspace, you could never be sure which would work, and the backspace key could sometimes do unexpected things. These days, backspace and delete generally do what you'd expect them to do.

To this day, I *still* automatically use shift-backspace to fix typos during login prompts, as well as ^D to forward delete instead of the delete key :) Just don't hold down ^D at an empty unix terminal prompt, or it will auto-exit the connection. This can be especially annoying in an environment when you have multiple console windows open and you hold down ^D on a blank prompt. The first window closes, focus switches to the next window, which in turn closes due to ^D on a blank prompt, etc.. In short order, all your windows are gone, all because you started deleting at the start of the command line and it ran out of stuff to delete. I never understood why this was a "feature". I have, however, adapted and will often use ^D on a blank prompt intentionally to exit a session (it's so much faster than typing "exit") ;P

A bit further off-topic, but there was one program on one system that I used one time where neither the ENTER nor the RETURN key functioned as expected. I was forced to resort to ^M to issue newlines! Ah, the days needing to know all of the alternate ^key commands :)

Well yeah...

[cshark]

but instagram is still the name brand that emo kids and hipsters are too good to admit they're using.

You mean, like 5 second films?

[DavidClarkeHR]

Wow. This is so innovative. I can't believe someone didn't invent it and bring it to the internet before 2008 ...

Re:You mean, like 5 second films?

[game kid]

I for one smell a hint of YTMND.

Re:You mean, like 5 second films?

[SolitaryMan]

Apples to Oranges.

5secondfilms is an art form. This new "service" is a dumpster where a bunch of kids will throw their crap that even youtube does not want.

Re:You mean, like 5 second films?

[Runaway1956]

"5secondfilms is an art form. This new "service" is a dumpster where a bunch of kids will throw their crap that even youtube and MySpace does not want."

Think that's more accurate?

Re:You mean, like 5 second films?

[sourcerror]

So much innovation ...

Re:You mean, like 5 second films?

[RaceProUK]

I for one smell a hint of YTMND.

At least YTMND knows it's making the Internet worse.

Whew!

[Megane]

Good thing twimg.com is blocked by the filter where I work! The last thing I need to see is pseudo-videos from a bunch of twits.

Re:Whew!

[thetoadwarrior]

So what you're saying is you have zero self control and rely in blocking software to stop you from frequenting a site. That is sad.

The Twitter Video Storyboard

[guttentag]

Second 1: Learn HTML and CGI
Second 2: Create a service that allows people to post and view super-abbreviated blog posts
Second 3: Buy a video service, integrate with your existing service
Second 4: Limit videos to six seconds
Second 5: ?????
Second 6: Profit!

I've never understood...

[Darkness404]

I've never understood the appeal in Twitter or this hype about abbreviated messages, videos, etc.

I mean, 140 characters made sense in an era before widespread smartphones, where the average person only had a phone capable of receiving SMSes and carriers often charged per message.

But its 2013, we've got faster internet connections via mobile networks than what most of us used to have back home ten years ago. With all this added bandwidth you think we'd be overcoming limitations, not adding in more.

Re:I've never understood...

[guttentag]

How much time do you have to read a bunch of random posts by your friends/celebrities/companies? Most people have a lot of things competing for their attention, personally and professionally. If the posts are limited in size so you can very quickly scan them all, you're more likely to read them. And the authors of the posts are more likely to make every byte count. Instead of rambling on, they're more likely to reconsider what they actually need to say to get their point across. They distill their messages.

How often does someone send you a link to a video expecting you're going to watch 6 minutes to get 6 seconds of information from somewhere in the middle of it? After about 10 seconds, I close the window and more on to the next thing that needs my attention. If the author is limited to six seconds of video, they're going to make every second count, and you're more likely to actually watch it.

Re:I've never understood...

[Darkness404]

Except that Twitter is almost never just 140 characters. Rather, it is 10 words of description and then a shortened URL to who-knows-what. There's very little meaningful information that can be conveyed via video in 6 seconds.

Re:I've never understood...

[buswolley]

I should start a twitter for intellects, and require > 140 characters to post.

Re:I've never understood...

[guttentag]

Except that Twitter is almost never just 140 characters. Rather, it is 10 words of description and then a shortened URL to who-knows-what.

That's just people thinking they're outsmarting the system by working around it because they're not smart enough to realize why the limit is there. And you're free to decide their shortened URL isn't worth following. I ignore all tweets that contain a shortened URL if they don't adequately describe what they're sending me to. And I ignore all Twitterers (Twitterheads?) who use shortened URLs in every other tweet. People who post or read that stuff deserve what they get -- it's like watching (or appearing on) Jerry Springer. How embarrassing.

There's very little meaningful information that can be conveyed via video in 6 seconds.

Depends on how you parse it. I would say that there's very little information that can be conveyed in four hours of watching C-SPAN. You'll likely get more out of the 140-character-or-less headline about Congress in The New York Times the next day.

Re: I've never understood...

[guttentag]

I can say "Fuck You!" 14 times in six seconds. That should be enough to get my point across.

Ah, but you could say it 17.5 times textually in a tweet, which is far more efficient. Oddly enough, I still don't get your point. Repeating yourself does not make it clearer. Are you upset at the poster, Twitter, Vine, or yourself?

Re:I've never understood...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I agree. 140 characters is just ridiculous. Where would we be if say, Pierre de Fermat, had been similarly limited to express himself?

Re:I've never understood...

[Mr. Slippery]

I've never understood the appeal in Twitter or this hype about abbreviated messages, videos, etc.

See the relevant xkcd strip.

But its 2013, we've got faster internet connections via mobile networks than what most of us used to have back home ten years ago.

Not always, no. You can send an SMS from a hell of a lot more territory than you can get a data connection.

Re: I've never understood...

[webmistressrachel]

140 characters is enough for me to correct your grammar (more readable, not more clear) and still say it 4 times.

Re:I've never understood...

[SuperKendall]

Given that you control who you follow, it's you own fault for following people that post links and not text. Very little content in the twitter feed of people I follow even has links.

Re:I've never understood...

[wiredlogic]

Simple: Twitter has to pay for SMS gateway access to receive tweets from people's phones. They get special bulk rates which would have to be adjusted higher to compensate for the extra bandwidth if they accepted multi-part SMS traffic. To get the cheapest rate they keep the limit to the max length of a single SMS message.

Even in this era of widespread smartphones with high speed cellular data and WiFi connectivity, the SMS functionality is implemented as a kludge on top of the old voice protocol. That implementation can't be upgraded easily due to service requirements for emergency messaging and the like that can't be reliably performed with more modern data transmission.

Re:I've never understood...

[Vintermann]

You used more than 140 characters in your post, this detracts from your argument.

Re:I've never understood...

[squiggleslash]

It's a two-way thing, you keep your message short and people will read it. Moreover, people will read them even if you post a lot of messages.

Think of it this way, as a reader: you may have noticed that most blogging services like LiveJournal initially provided a feed that showed every single post, in full, that had been posted by the people you follow (obviously paged, and obviously in date order.) While I rather liked that, it started to get unwieldy when you started to follow a lot of people, and started to see a lot of messages on your feed. Meanwhile, many messages were hidden. Each blog entry, after all, usually had a comments section, and people would write comments that you often wanted to read, but weren't in that feed.

The result was that blogging services started to decline. Some, like Multiply, replaced their UI entirely and prevented anyone from getting hold of that kind of feed, regardless of whether they wanted it or not. Others, like LiveJournal, started to lose readers. Those that rejigged their UIs tended to do so suboptimally too, the new user interfaces for the most part didn't replicate the conversational aspect of seeing blog entries from the people you followed and made it easier to miss things in the noise.

Twitter is a relatively good approach to fixing that. It comes in from the other direction: fix the bloggers, not the reader. People are encouraged to keep their messages short. If someone has something complicated to say, they can always post a headline and a link. If someone has something easy to say that just won't fit in 140 characters, you can always split your message across two or more tweets. Because of the 140 character limit, you can now handle more messages, which means implementation changes that help readers: for example, tweets don't have a comment section, you reply to tweets with more tweets, and those tweets also appear in the timelines of people following you, so they don't miss the conversation.

It's not ideal, but for the most part I think it works.

Re:I've never understood...

[mspohr]

The limited size of messages ensures that they will be devoid of any useful content.
Most of them are "Look! a squirrel!" type messages and can be ignored. They do fit well with the attention span of many people.
I think the problem is that the bandwidth of people has shrunk to Twitter size.

Re:I've never understood...

[MyHair]

Except that Twitter is almost never just 140 characters. Rather, it is 10 words of description and then a shortened URL to who-knows-what. There's very little meaningful information that can be conveyed via video in 6 seconds.

In 140 characters you can learn whether or not you want to follow the link. (Or the tweeter.) It's brilliant.

Not sure what 6 seconds of video can do, but I'm interested in finding out.

Re:I've never understood...

[MyHair]

I should start a twitter for intellects, and require > 140 characters to post.

Not.

XXXX XXXX xxxx xxx XXXX xxxxx XXXX (stupid word count filter for posts) xxx XXXX

(^^ example of a post on your twitter for intellects site :-) )

Re: I've never understood...

[thewolfkin]

"Washed my brain with Gain so I could think more clearer" - UB 2 Pretty lol.. rappers no one else has heard of

Gif vs Vine

[BrookHarty]

I wonder, is the vine format smaller than gif? Lots of small gifs all around, so no reason they couldnt be placed if devices can view them.
Only problem I can think of, I want to be able to see them on my android phone and laptop and no viewer yet?

Not sure what all the hate is, its like people dont like new tech around here.

Wont anyone think of the copywrite infringement!?!

[stewsters]

Wont anyone think of the copywrite infringement!?! Most pirates on YouTube already break films into sections, this wont help the trend. I don't want to watch 1200 segments for a 2 hour movie.

attention span

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Makes sense considering the average attention span of their demographic

Re:attention span

[Osgeld]

to be fair most of their demographic wouldn't know how to count to 140 if it wasnt for twitter

so its really helping society by extending these peoples attention span to 6 seconds

Re:attention span

[alostpacket]

I have a long, detailed reply to this -- hang on

YTMND

[Lehk228]

so it's like YTMND except with less hentai

Just long enough for an "Ow My Balls!" segment...

[jeffb (2.718)]

Yep, it's all coming together. As It Was Foretold.

Pointless

[GrahamCox]

Sounds utterly pointless, tedious, narcissistic and unnecessary. I'm sure it'll be a huge hit.

Oww! My Balls!

[Irate Engineer]

Six second video bites - This is another example of "Idiocracy" come to reality. Let me summarize the content: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_4jrMwvZ2A

oblig

[alostpacket]

Ah the Internet -- where the men are boys, the women are men, and the teenage girls are FBI agents.

Re:oblig

[thewolfkin]

no no man.. little girls are real :roll:

6 seconds of porn?

[richardoz]

The subject says it all...

"There's a Brand New Dance, Spread Far and Wide"

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"C'mon, and show it/Let's Do the Goatse!
It's better than Sext/Girl, Do the Goatse!
I see it coming down the Vine/Let's Do the Goatse!"

GIF vs. AVC

[tepples]

is the vine format smaller than gif?

I'd assume so. MPEG-4 AVC is a much more efficient codec for live-action moving images than GIF animation.

Re:GIF vs. AVC

[SuricouRaven]

At six seconds, you could fit the whole video into one GOP.

WarioWare: You must DIY!

[tepples]

Next we'll be seeing four second video games. Oh wait, that's already happened.

a replica of

[katsh]

http://robo.to/ been doing this for years.

6 Seconds?

[sidevans]

What if you have a stut.. a stut... a stut... a stutter-LIMIT OF VIDEO LENGTH

The Scourge of Digital Minimalism: TwitterBits

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Never thought I'd see the day when arbitrarily imposed 'less', and not cleverly achieved 'more' -- becomes the fad and business model. It is perverse, evolution in reverse, an ill wind.

Imagine folks abandoning Twitter en mass on the announcement of a competitor with a 139 character limit. And so on until we are down to a single bit.

I can see it now, some people will log on to TwitterBit to twit ones, some twit zeroes. If my TwitterBit matches yours we are best friends forever, if it does not we are enemies to the death. All humor will degrade to a series of obvious dumb patterns, the dumber they are the funnier they will be:

11111111111111111111 [fan site, boring]
00000000000000000 [goth site, boring]
101010101010101011 [groan, indignation]
0000000000000000001 [ROFL!]

Chuck Norris will twit neither 0 nor 1. He will go directly for the carry bit, which flips all the other bits.

Then some time in the distant future, someone will issue a series of TwitterBits that when rasterized on paper produce an amazing pictograph of Dancing Snoopy. It will take the world by storm, be reproduced on billboards and magazines.

And the human race will rediscover the print terminal and fanfold paper and have to re-learn the whole process of making pictures again. Round and round it goes.

perfect match

[terec]

140 character messages, 5 second video clips, and iOS-only.

Re:Wont anyone think of the copywrite infringement

[thewolfkin]

dude.. i'm in a computer lab.. i can't be laughing this hard when people are watching.