Twitter has launched Vine….their brand new way of sharing short looping video. 6 seconds or less to be precise. This certainly helps cater for our increasingly short-attention spans whilst consuming online content. Facebook has made us require instant gratification with short one sentence posts (Ok…you can post more than a sentence but this seems to be the norm) and Twitter’s own 140 maximum character Tweets have made our social media interaction short and sweet.
I think that Twitter’s Vine is fantastic because online video is a very different beast to the a Tweet or a Facebook post. YouTube has given host to a plethora of great audio visual content but there’s also lots of rubbish on there with misleading titles and dull content which can be a waste of time. In fact, I’ve just watched an whole 15 or so minutes of a video which promised one thing in it’s title but delivered everything around the topic but what the title suggested. I was fuming at having wasted my time and the video wanted even rated to warn me and it didn’t have any comments so perhaps I deserved to have my time wasted in this instance but I wasn’t to know.
Wasting 6 seconds isn’t so bad I suppose but how much video content can you really lay down in 6 seconds or less? Small businesses could have a sped up video walk through of their business premises, you could produce an animated flick book, a short snappy message, a funny snippet or clip, a Birthday, Christmas or Valentine’s message and lots more. Quite frankly, I’m pretty excited about what can be done and I reckon you’d get more views than a longer video. But 6 seconds does seem very short when you first consider it.
