Remember the good old days when the only social networks were Myspace and Hi5? I especially loved how you could personalize the background of Myspace and automatically play music videos. I often wondered why it took so long for my page to load (yes… I was that girl).
Then Facebook came around with its boring white background, and I wondered why anyone would ditch Myspace for it. How would I express my creativity now? That’s when I learned not to always trust my first impressions of brand new social networks. This is why I shied away from Vine, Twitter’s new video app that launched on January 24, 2013. (On a side-note, did you know Twitter uses Blogger for it’s Blog? Who knew!?)
Here’s a breakdown of everything you need to know about Vine:
- Vine is a mobile service that lets users upload short videos (6 seconds or less) that loop over and over.
- You can download Vine for free on iTunes and it’s only available on the iPhone or iPod touch.
- When you download Vine it makes you confirm that you’re over 17 as it contains age-restricted material. This confirms what Brian tweeted me last week.
- Vine has its own blog that you can follow here: www.vine.co/blog.
- The folks at Vine redesigned it three times before launching it, they are still thinking of new ways to update it.
- You can sign up for Vine using your Twitter credentials or you can sign up the old fashioned way using your email address.
- Vine doesn’t have a play button, pause button, timeline scrubber, etc. It’s supposed to be simple.
- Vine was a separate company that was bought out by Twitter. In Vine’s very first blog post, they say, “Our companies share similar values and goals; like Twitter, we want to make it easier for people to come together to share and discover what’s happening in the world. We also believe constraint inspires creativity…”.
- You can share videos on Twitter and Facebook and they will be adding new networks shortly.
- Marketers are already using Vine to showcase their products and services.
- After downloading Vine, you can follow other Vine users that use Twitter. Many of the people I follow have already downloaded Vine.
- There’s a short tutorial that shows you how to use Vine. It records video when you hold your finger down on the screen and you filme three separate videos that loop together.
After playing with Vine, and researching it on the net, I think it’s fun to use both personally and professionally. Businesses can use Vine to take advantage of consumers short attention spans and to share creative, catchy videos. Vine videos are less concerned with quality and more about the content itself according to Hubspot.
Find me on Vine at @samtaracollier. I haven’t uploaded anything yet but I’ll be experimenting!
What do you think of Vine? Do you think it has any use for law firms?
