Vine™ has a wall to climb
A framework for online photo sharing
Successful video sharing has been something of a unicorn – mostly because unsuccessful video sharing is such an obvious idea. After photos took off, people thought, “obviously we can make millions on video!” Yet, app stores have been a virtual graveyard of video apps that have tried and failed.
When Vine was released in January it was a huge step forward. Unlike its predecessors, the interface was beautiful, and its hybrid stop-motion/real-time video was a huge improvement. Yet it was, and still is missing something: most of the content simply doesn’t look good.
See, the genius of Instagram is that it makes mediocre pictures look awesome. Suddenly everybody was an “artist”. That old sign? Wrap it in Mayfair: 96 likes. Your cat? Add a touch of Willow and he’s instant vintage: 127 likes. This was all folly of course, but we believed we were awesome because Instagram helped us to.
Yet Vine was a different animal. The videos were shaky and looked…well, average. Your content was only as beautiful as what you put into it. Then Instagram comes along with its filters and stabilization and crushes it. Add the ability to overlay your favorite tunes and you’ve got a masterpiece.
As a slight addendum, online sharing largely fills seven needs, nearly all of which are fairly well served at this point:
- Conversational : Facebook
- Organizational : also Facebook, but perhaps room for a competitor here
- Transactional : Snapchat
- Broadcast : Twitter
- Curation : Pinterest
- Artistic : Instagram
- Inspirational : still seems fragmented amongst blogs, although Medium is a great start in terms of written text
While I have all the respect in the world for Jack Dorsey, in its current instantiation, Vine doesn’t fit well into any of these needs. We love filters and image stabilization for the same reason we love jeans and makeup: they make us feel like the best version of ourselves.
