VINE: Twitter’s New social Networking Platform

Just when you thought you’d been social enough, right before you’d done enough networking for a lifetime, here comes one more social network to invade your personal time!

The latest offering for the butterfly in you is called Vine. Yes yes, I know, not the best name, but we’ve certainly seen worse. To be honest, the giant behind this new comer carries with it enough mind share to make you forget the name, it could have been called rusty pipe and we would all still be interested.

The good folks at twitter (the jolly @ giant behind Vine) are looking for another “what is it?” “where did this come from?” hit. Twitter was unique enough to create a good following (pun intended) before its fully realized functionality had even kicked in, that’s special. Could they go two for two?

So what is Vine? Simply, a video sharing social networking experience. It is done in true Twitter fashion, minimalistic. Users will be able to share videos no longer than 6 seconds to their friends. Perhaps that’s super cool to some of you, perhaps its silly or maybe you’re just not excited because it has been done a few times over in the past year or so, but what makes Vine a bit more special is the way the videos are shot and edited.

Video is recorded by holding your finger on the screen, remove it, and the recording stops. This allows you to seemingly splice random clips together for a great short story, .gif style! It really is a bit tricky to explain, so take a look at the video below.

The videos produced by Vine really do have a uniqueness about them, perhaps enough to carry it through to a decent buzz. Vines are then shared to your in app feed, at which point your followers can like, comment and share to their Vine followers. Options to share on twitter and Facebook are also available. Although there was a bit of a spat between Facebook and twitter over allowing Vine to reference APIs to allow friend imports. Also worthy of gossip, Vines shared on twitter are embedded, meaning a preview of the vine is up front and center, a simple click starts the video. One must wonder, was this what the instagram twitter thing was all about? Did twitter play their hand to protect their new baby? Interesting.

In the end, I think Vine will do fine as an artistic outlet for those who have the gifted vision of cinematography,and maybe even one day, it would be the next instagram, where people get a hold of it and post ignorance all day long!

As of right now, Vine is only available on the iPhone, look out for an Android version and hopefully a Windows Phone version soon.