Vine - Make a scene

Vine is a video-sharing app from the same people that make Twitter. Designed as an extension to the service, it essentially enables you to make the video equivalent of tweets – six-second snapshots. And, luckily for us, it’s exclusively available for iPhone at present.

The clever thing is that Vine enables you to tap and hold your iPhone’s screen so that you can record. Lift off, and the recording pauses. The upshot of this is that you can record videos that are effectively time-lapse, so we’ve already seen things such as a cup of coffee disappearing as it is drunk, as well as very simple animation. Videos can be shared to Facebook as well as Twitter automatically, and will be saved on your Vine Profile.

It has stirred latent creativity in the same way as Twitter did in the early days, and it’s clear that Vine was designed as an antidote to YouTube, which is moving toward longer form content having removed its original 10-minute limit. The set-up is slick; it loads up a stream of videos when you first start – a mix of curated Editor’s Choice videos and those uploaded by your friends. You can switch between this Home view, Explore (to see and search for things that other people are posting about), Activity (to find out who has liked and commented on your clips) and your own Profile. You can also find people to follow on Vine from your Contacts or Twitter account or just search for them – it’s a separate Follow system from Twitter.

It’s a very simple yet well-designed app, with the emphasis on the content rather than the app itself. We admire the creativity on show here, but for us a simple question remains; if something’s worth filming rather than taking a still, isn’t it worth filming for more than six seconds?