Vine is the video equivalent of the carefully cropped Facebook photo.<p>The narcissistic services like Twitter and Facebook haven't really had a video equivalent. By limiting the videos to 6 seconds people will be able to post little videos without requiring the talent or effort to make something longer that people will be willing to watch.<p>Just as the reddit front page has become dominated by meme images that require little brain power to consume, Vine will ideal for LOL videos posted by people. I suspect it will be very successful.<p>Also, the OP says "Instagram makes everyone ‘creative’." Seriously?
When I saw Vine I instantly thought of Cinegram [1]. Basically it's like Vine but it allows you to selectively animate portions of the video. This leads to lots of hilarious gif-like clips which IMO are much more shareable (and addictive) than Vine.<p>[1] <a href="http://cinemagr.am/" rel="nofollow">http://cinemagr.am/</a>
Like the insights and mostly agree.<p>I think you missed an interesting point, though:<p>Can Twitter (or Facebook, or anyone else for that matter) still build the next big thing internally? Are these companies still as 'startup' as they think they are, or are they now too slow and bureaucratic to come up with products unrelated to their own core functionality?<p>A follow question: should they even come up with the new cool thing, or should they focus on their core offerings and simply buy break out successes when they are apparent?<p>In my opinion, both FB and Twitter are overestimating their chances here, like any incumbent always does (see Christensen). The questions "what if Google does this" is dismissed by every founder, because obviously Google is too focused on its core mission to make the success of a new social app the forefront of its development efforts.<p>Both companies are focusing more and more on being platforms for others, rather than building and testing all new paradigms themselves. This is what being the incumbent allows you to do, taking much larger risks, with larger payoffs. Launching a lot of small apps with cool ideas certainly shouldn't be their core business when they need to figure out how to deal with their growing developer ecosystem (again, something both companies are struggling with).<p>Acting on fear, which both companies did with their recent apps, certainly isn't the right strategy. But maybe I'm wrong and Twitter and Facebook are the only companies that can escape the innovator's dilemma?<p>BTW - Google is doing fine on that front with self driving cars and rockets, despite their not so apparent track record in social.
Vine is about forcing creativity and curation of the visual world around us. 6 seconds really limits the amount of content you include in order to tell a simple story. The 140 character limit on Twitter, whether purposeful or not initially, also forces this creativity and simplifying a message to give as much meaning possible in as little space possible.<p>Imagine if Twitter had / was able to acquire Instagram. That, plus Vine, and I'd say Twitter would be on their way to helping rapidly kill Facebook; Now Facebook's death with just be a bit slower, and they may own some more assets that might be worth something.
When people say things like "I thought it would be interesting to unpack Vine’s success so far", what is "success" based on?<p>Is Vine a "success"/popular? How is this quantified?
Why no mention of Keek in any of these Vine discussions? It's the closest competitor in functionality and has some serious traction in the microvideo space.
I wrote the same thing yesterday. It will be very interesting to see how this battle for video pans out.<p><a href="http://lukethomas.com/vine-is-for-storytelling/" rel="nofollow">http://lukethomas.com/vine-is-for-storytelling/</a>