Editor’s Note: Vine has sadly closed down but we have left this article up for nostalgia’s sake! May it help your reminisce about the good ole days when joy came in 6 second segments.
What is Vine, you may be asking? Well, Vine is one of the latest social media phenomenon to grace the internet. The purpose of Vine is to allow people to share short (6 seconds infact!) videos online. However, Vine videos differ from normal videos taken on smartphones, in that you have to keep your finger pressed on the screen in order for your video to record. The really cool thing about this is that it enables people to easily make short stop-motion animations, and then share them with their friends.
The brainchild of Dom Hofmann and Rus Yusupov back in June 2012, it took only a matter of months before it gained the attention of the social media ‘big boys’. In October 2012, Vine was acquired by Twitter. The techy guys at Twitter soon got to work on fine tuning the app and getting it ready for public launch, and on January 24th, 2013, Vine became a free iOS app on the iPhone and iPod Touch, available through the iTunes App Store. Then after months of twiddling my thumbs, waiting around, (I’m an Android user!) on June 2nd 2013, Vine finally released the Android version onto the Google Play store, much to my delight! As it now meant I could broadcast my every thought by word (twitter), picture (Instagram) and short videos (vine). If only there was a platform that could deliver all 3? *cough* Facebook *cough*.
Comedians like Frankie Boyle often use Twitter to post brief (sometimes offensive) jokes to their followers, which is cool, BUT, not as cool as telling a quick joke in the space of a 6 second video!
One of my personal favourite social comics is @nottjmiller, he has a really odd, quirky sense of humour, and often posts really odd videos onto his Vine, including this one, my personal favourite: click here! (p.s: watch the skull)
Comedians or their management companies can use Vine as a way of promoting upcoming shows or tours, or even DVD releases. Due to the popular use of stop-motion on Vine, it would be easy to show all of a comedians upcoming tour dates, in one 6 second video. Or the comedians themselves can use it (much like T J Miller above) as a form of subtle self promotion, telling jokes or showing us weird cryptic insights into their minds to generate an almost viral ‘buzz’ around them.
Now, if only ‘Master of Puns’, comedian Tim Vine got Vine account eh?
