Something to Vine About: Our review of Twitter's new social media app

Last week, Twitter launched Vine – a new mobile service that allows users to share six-second videos. These clips are the video equivalent of a tweet: concise, random and witty. We thought this was a great idea and believed the program would bring social media to a whole new level. One of the promotional photos says: “Capture your world in a fun and simple way,” and we agreed – until we tried it out.

In theory, this app is indeed fun and simple, and we loved some of the videos posted by other users. So, we were eager to make a clip of our own, and to our surprise, we ran into quite some difficulties.
Problem number one: This app is currently only available for iPhones and iPods. This may not be a deal breaker for many of you – I have only met two people in LA so far who do not have an iPhone – but for me, it is. In Europe, the iPhone is not nearly as widespread as here, and I find it surprising that a social media giant like Twitter would develop an app exclusive to iPhones, leaving android devices behind. (I’m sure Twitter is working on fixing this, but it is nonetheless disappointing.)
Having said that, the app itself is easy to understand: take a video of whatever you like and share it. You are not restricted to recording the six seconds in one piece. Just keep your finger pressed to record and lift to pause and press again to resume recording. This way you can take different shots in one short video, and it allows for the clip to tell a story – very clever and creative!
We had the idea of filming the view from our office window at different times of the day, in order to show the change in light. Well, yesterday at 5 p.m., the sky had a beautiful shade of pink, and we were excited to continue the video we had started earlier, but alas, you can’t save drafts on Vine, so our previous snippet had vanished. This major flaw does not allow you to leave the app and come back to your video later, and we were quite bewildered to realize that our great idea would not work out.
This morning we were ready for a fresh start and gave Vine another try. This time, filming three short frames without leaving the app. After two failed attempts – I had not kept my finger pressed to record – we finally managed to make a good video. However, we were unable to watch the clip we had made before proceeding to the next step – posting the video.
This is another factor that needs to be changed. In my opinion, you cannot be expected to upload something without having a look at it first. And yet, we were not discouraged – we really wanted to post our video – and uploaded the clip to Joseph’s twitter profile. Well, that did not work either. We started over repeatedly, each time making a new video. Remember: Vine does not save drafts. And, after three failed uploads, we finally gave up.
It may very well be that we were too technologically inept for Vine, and we just couldn’t figure it out (other users obviously did). However, if there is one rule of thumb about social media,  it is that social media should be able to be used by everybody. This is especially true for Twitter.
All in all, Vine is a great concept, and this app has lots of potential. It does need some fine tuning though, and when it is available for my android, I’ll be glad to give it another try.