
Vine is a mobile app owned by Twitter that enables its users to create and post short video clips. The service was introduced with a maximum clip length of six seconds and can be shared or embedded on social networking services such as Twitter (which acquired the app in October 2012) and Facebook.
What Exactly Is Vine?
Vine is a video-sharing app. But it’s not just any video-sharing app. It’s designed in a way for you to film short, separate instances so they can be linked together for a total of six seconds. Each short video plays in a continuous loop and is viewable directly in Twitter’s timeline.
How the Vine App Works
The app is similar to Instagram and it shows you a scrollable feed of all your friends’ vines on the home screen. You also have your own profile page, which you can customize later after signing up. Vine takes most of your information from Twitter, including name, photo, bio and transfers it to your new Vine account when you sign up.
Making Your First Vine
When you’re ready to make your first vine, the app will walk you through all the steps. The idea is to film very short, separate instances for a full six-second video. As you get started with filming, the app will ask you to hold your finger down on the screen for about 1 to 2 seconds. After that, it will ask you to film two more times. Vine then puts all three of those two-second shots together to make your first vine.
Exploring and Interacting on Vine
Since it’s still quite new, Vine lacks a lot of features that other apps have, but still offers the basics to make it a mobile social network. There’s an Explore tab, which displays a search bar for you to find vines with specific tags or keywords. You can browse through the “Editor’s Picks” and the “Popular Now” section to help you quickly find some of the best vines, or you can tap any of the icons below with some of the featured tags.
The Activity tab shows who follows you, who comments on your vines, and who presses the smiley face “like” button on any of them. Every vine has an option for you to like and leave comments, almost identical to Instagram.
Is It Worth Using?
Right now with Vine being so new, unfortunately there are quite a few downsides in terms of capabilities. Vine cannot access Facebook friends and other social media sites; so it can’t automatically connect you to those in your social media networks who are already on Vine.
There’s also no way to take video from your camera roll and upload it at a later time to Vine. Vine web pages don’t have any social sharing buttons and there’s no way to share directly to other popular social networks -- like Tumblr.
The features and functionality that it lacks will probably be worked into the app sometime in the future. If someone is on Twitter, Vine is a really neat tool to use, because Vine’s Twitter card integration make it look like an animated image or GIF right in your Twitter stream.