Vine launches, Twitter and Facebook clash over access, users lose


Craig Kanalley has a good breakdown over at HuffPo about Twitter's acquisition/launch of Vine, an iOS app described as kind of a "video instagram" that allows you to share 6-second looping video clips. Kinda like ani-GIFs in video form, sort of, but proprietary. Twitter-only.

I have mixed feelings about Vine, not because I don't think the idea is kind of cute and nifty, or that people won't find clever creative uses—it's just not as open and interoperable as I'd like. As media sharing services such as Vine and Instagram grow, the already-siloed social web becomes ever more so. And, that's not good.

As Rob Pegoraro said on Twitter today, where I was thinking out loud about the fact that the form and medium of Vine videos are inherently branded, in a way…

People are fine with the artificial constraints of various forms of poetry, but those don't belong to Haiku, Inc. or Iambic LLC.

In his HuffPo article, Craig aptly explains how mom (Twitter) and dad (Facebook) keep fighting and can't we all just be nice to each other and the kids are the ones who lose out the most.

Related: Doug Gross at CNN.com has some ideas on how Vine could change Twitter.

UPDATE: I originally embedded a tweet in this post that contained a "Vine" (I guess that's the shorthand people are using for their particular 6-second looping format). On some browsers, including Safari on iOS, the goddamned thing auto-played with sound, taking over the browser, whenever you load the Boing Boing front door. That ain't right. I've removed it.