Like Liz Lemon, my eyes are in great danger of either getting stuck in permanent eye roll, or being ejected from my head due to how unnaturally strong my eye-roll muscles are from said activity.
So I didn’t roll my eyes when Vine became so closely integrated with Twitter, and really haven’t noticed it appear in my stream much, or in any of the lists I monitor. But then a few friends posted a site called Vine Peek, which just loads random Vines in your browser, so random that occasionally the same Vine gets posted twice.
In case you’ve been purposely ignoring the news as I sometimes do to finish a project on time, Vine is an app that helps you create 6 second loops of video – it’s the video version of the animated gif.
At this point, I would like to thank you for trying not to roll your eyes. It seems like it could be a fun app if you have time for that sort of thing. Of course after watching some on Vine Peek, several thoughts occurred to me.
The first is the one I call “my Twitter reflex” – named after Twitter because like 90% of other people upon first hearing of Twitter before 2009, thought it was a dumb idea and immediately dismissed it until something came later to change my mind.
I thought “wow this is dumb” and went to do something else.
Then my friend Kami (@kamichat on Twitter) made an interesting point the next time around. To paraphrase her, it’s not the tool that’s dumb, it’s the way people use it.
And I thought, hey, it could be in the way people don’t use it.
My third thought was – the ones with kids are so cute. I’d love to see my nieces and nephews in a series of quick vines throughout the day.
Then I thought, I must get back to work immediately as I am now in danger of wasting a whole day. :)
So my conclusion right now? People aren’t sure what to use Vine for, so for now, maybe the content will continue to lean towards sucking to people seeing them out of context. But we don’t know that will be a permanent state.
After all, it seems that Vines created for you by people you care about are a big hit. Not that I’m hinting that either of my sisters, my older brother or my parents should get on Vine and start cranking out some kid content just for me.
For the rest of us, I’d put my money on someone really creative using Vines for something great like:
- Summarizing content in other forums
- Teasers that get you to follow through to other content
- A way of expressing an idea in both a brief and compelling way.
After letting Vine Peek spin for 15 minutes, it seems that it’s best for summing up a moment quickly. As you can see from a quick look around, I have problems expressing myself with brevity.
But I’m not so horrible at summing up what I was trying to say later in a few quick shots. The connection is sure to be made soon between all the advantages of making short videos and how much easier it is to get someone to watch something six seconds long.
And I think that coupling is what will prompt either more valuable and entertaining Vines or the last nail in the coffin as certain types of marketers and sale people who think they’re marketers crap all over what could be a cute concept.
I mean, hey, I used to hate every animated gif known to man. Then I saw some clever ones on Tumblr, and I don’t even hate the dumb ones anymore.
Maybe it takes 100 failed excuses for artistic expression for every one that makes you smile.
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