MAT HONAN
The
Perfect Gif
Why
Vine is way more than just another video-sharig app.
The very best things we make are those allows us to
make other, better things-tools that forge
connections and empower creativity. One of the latest of these is Vine, Twitter’s
new video-sharing app. It lets people shoot and share six-second
looped clips. I know,
sounds boring-like socialcam or Viddy or anyother Instagram-for-video
effort. But it’s not. It’s fundamentally different.
Vines are more like GIF’s than
Youtube clips. Vine almost doesn’t feel like a video app at
all. It’s own thing: A code that unlocks creativity in six-second
bursts. A powerful tool for real-time journalism. An
entirely new art form. And it’s going to be really big.
Like
Twitter and Instagram, Vine is built on constraints. You can’t add extra audio.
Videos are lo-def. You can’t edit footage-it splices everything together in the
sequence it was shot. No filters. No
Record button. No Play button, even. It’s touch to shooy, scroll to
play.
Vine
leans heavily on GIF culture, with its simple clips often used to
express complex ideas and emotions. It’s an information-dense, fast-loading stream. Everything is
signal or skip. Yet it has problems-for instance,
porn. Fine, who cares? But Vine’s porn has popped
feed and, at least once, it’s Editor’s Picks. That’s bad. Nobody should see a
penis unless they want to see penis.
It also
lacks some basic social features. People discovery is a mess-especially since Facebook quickly barred Vine
from using it’s social graph. You can’t edit titles or tags or comments after
posting them. You can’t link in-app to videos you like, which is important if Vine
wants to attract new users. Twitter is
working o fixing all those things. It has already removed the ability
to search for Vies tagged as porn.
Vine
actually feels a bit rushed-and that’s because it is. Twitter knew that Vine
was far from perfect whe it released the service into the wild. “You reach a point
where you want to see how the world’s going to use it”, says Michael Sippey, who runs consumer products
for Twitter.
And
that’s what convices me that Vine is going to be big. It’s quickly
generating its own culture, and it’s already being used to commit minors acts
of journalism. When a water main broke in Manhattan, shutting down part of Fifth
Avenue, it was broadcast on Vine. Before the city of San Francisco announced
why a metro line quit running during on morning rush, a Vine loop had
documented a broken-down train.
Vine
has even jumped its own walls. Sites like Vinecats.com and Vinepeek.com give
you, respectively, cat clips and a raw, real-time look at everything being
uploaded to Vine
Speaking
of cats, Vine quickly birthed its own hashtag tropes. The #magic loops of things
crawling across a desktop can’t go on much longer, right? (Right?!?) And the
app is overrun with food-but instead of what you’re eating it shows how you’re
making it. Of course, the knock on Vine is that it’s banal- a charge that was
thrown at Twitter and instagram before it. But whe a place landed in the
Hudson, and Tahrir Square erupted, these services were recognized as potent tools
for distributing information rapidly.
Vine
will have its Arab Spring moment. It will document violence and triumphs.
Celebrities will storm it for six seconds of self-promotion while it mints its
own new stars. And soon enough it will be yet another pervasive real-time window
on the world.
Dificult
Word
Forge
: menempa
Looped
: diligkarkan
Bursts
: semburan
Constraints
: kendala
Sequence
: urutan
Dense
: padat
Instance
: contoh
Popped
: muncul
Discovery
: penemuan
Attract
: menarik
