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Twitter's Vine App Ready To Bomb Internet With GIF-Like Videos 117

Posted by samzenpus from the six-seconds-you-won't-get-back dept.
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."
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Twitter's Vine App Ready To Bomb Internet With GIF-Like Videos More

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

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  • bomb the internet? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by YrWrstNtmr ( 564987 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:58PM (#42686163)
    No. It will bomb Twitter. Those of us who don't use twitter will never see or worry about these 6 second clips.
    • On Twitter I can actually interact with celebrities directly, on Facebook I can consume what their handlers put online. Huge difference. Twitter is like IRC for the world, dive in, read and chat, go about your day. - HEX

      • Re:bomb the internet? (Score:5, Funny)

        by YrWrstNtmr ( 564987 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:10PM (#42686287)
        On Twitter I can actually interact with celebrities directly...

        Ok, why?

        • Re: bomb the internet? (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

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

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

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

        • 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.

          • 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

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

              • i disagree. it's maybe not the best medium for discussion but if you've mastered brevity it can and does work.
          • 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: (Score:1)

          by Prokur ( 2445102 )
          On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog

      • Re:bomb the internet? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Firehed ( 942385 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:15PM (#42686325) Homepage

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

        • 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: (Score:1)

            by 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.

          • Re:bomb the internet? (Score:5, Funny)

            by Alien Being ( 18488 ) on Friday January 25, 2013 @01:57AM (#42688081)

            Shatner needs 140 characters just for whitespace.

      • 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.

      • "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 for

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Charliemopps ( 1157495 )

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

      • 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 eco

  • I guess you should be able to sext^H^H^H^Hfilm something in that length of time.
    • OK, I have to ask... What is ^H^H^H^H? Backspaces?

      • Re:6 seconds? (Score:4, Informative)

        by chronokitsune3233 ( 2170390 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @11:57PM (#42687549)
        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? (Score:4, Informative)

        by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Friday January 25, 2013 @03:58AM (#42688591)

        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.

      • 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.
        • 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!
      • 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 fi

  • 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? (Score:4, Informative)

    by DavidClarkeHR ( 2769805 ) <david.clarke@hr g e n e r a l i s t .ca> on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:02PM (#42686211)
    Wow. This is so innovative. I can't believe someone didn't invent it and bring it to the internet before 2008 [5secondfilms.com] ...
  • 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.
    • 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 (Score:3)

    by guttentag ( 313541 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:05PM (#42686235) Journal
    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 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.
    • 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.
      • 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... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by buswolley ( 591500 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:32PM (#42686515) Journal
          I should start a twitter for intellects, and require > 140 characters to post.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MyHair ( 589485 )

            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 :-) )

        • 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

        • 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: (Score:2)

          by MyHair ( 589485 )

          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.

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

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

      See the relevant xkcd strip [xkcd.com].

      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.

    • 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 imple

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mspohr ( 589790 )

      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.

  • 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!?! 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 (Score:3)

    by j00r0m4nc3r ( 959816 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:25PM (#42686449)
    Makes sense considering the average attention span of their demographic

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      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

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

  • YTMND (Score:3)

    by Lehk228 ( 705449 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:30PM (#42686493) Journal
    so it's like YTMND except with less hentai

  • Just long enough for an "Ow My Balls!" segment... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jeffb (2.718) ( 1189693 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:40PM (#42686595)

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

  • Pointless (Score:3)

    by GrahamCox ( 741991 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:45PM (#42686631) Homepage
    Sounds utterly pointless, tedious, narcissistic and unnecessary. I'm sure it'll be a huge hit.
  • 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 [youtube.com]
  • The subject says it all...
  • http://robo.to/ [robo.to] been doing this for years.

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

  • 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

  • perfect match (Score:3)

    by terec ( 2797475 ) on Friday January 25, 2013 @07:30AM (#42689265)

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

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