App of the Week: Vine — Make a scene

Name: Vine — Make a scene
Platform: iOS
Price: Free

From 140 character to six seconds, brevity has its advantages.

Last week, Twitter unveiled its new videosharing platform, called Vine, allowing enthusiastic filmmakers to create snippets of non-sequential images using an intuitive mobile interface.

The app is ridiculously simple to use. Once you trigger the camera, as long as your finger touches the square-shaped viewfinder, the image will record, meaning that deliberate tap-and-release can essentially create stop-motion effects. Given the increasing popularity of gifs, this tools seems to offer unlimited creative possibilities. There are limits to the data you can transfer, so don’t get too carried away with experimenting or your might find your uploads failing.

All Vine videos are public by default. Sharing your video generates a unique URL, but there’s no intuitive way to pluck that URL from the app or conduct any hyperlinked search for all of a user’s Vine videos on the web interface.’  Similarly, there isn’t embed code available at this point, but I expect that will come as the app becomes more robust. You can see a sample Vine from Seattle here.

With the URL shared via social networking, you can access your Vine uploads on the web. There’s push-button sharing via twitter and facebook, an easy commenting and liking interface, and a mechanism to report inappropriate content. The initial news report focused on x-rated clips, but Vine has already been working on tackling that issue using methods pioneered by sharing sites like flickr, blocking untoward videos by mechanical means as well as offering a channel for user reporting.

A dashboard in the mobile interface features popular hashtags for inspiration. Given the ease of the platform and its integration with twitter, Vine is sure to be a big hit with iOS owners of all ages. There isn’t an Android version yet, but creating a youth services presence on Vine could put your library ahead of the curve.