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?

[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.

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?

[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 :)

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 ...

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!

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.

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

Re:I've never understood...

[buswolley]

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

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.

"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!"

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.