Vine review

What is Vine?

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Vine lets you take six-second video clips and post them both on Vine’s own social network, as well as Twitter and Facebook. It’s a simple app, but you’ll get a tutorial the first time you load it up anyway.

First up you’ll be asked to sign in with Twitter or via email. If you choose Twitter, your bio and picture will be pulled in – you can edit it if you want, but it will give you a profile that’s ready to go.

Making video is easy. On the Vine homescreen in the top right hand corner there is a video icon. Tap that and you’ll be taken to the capture screen.

To start recording you simply hold your finger on the screen, and remove to stop. This allows you to capture one single six-second clip, or stop and start during the same time frame to reduce a longer activity into its highlights. There’s a progress bar at the top so you can see how much time you have left to spare.

Similarly to Twitter and Instagram, when you share your clip you’re encouraged to use hashtags in your description in order for it to be easily searchable by others Vine users. When a hashtag starts to trend, you’ll find it in the ‘Explore’ section, along with all the recent videos that have been tagged with it.

Also in the ‘Explore’ section (found via the menu in the top left hand corner on the home screen), you’ll find the most liked videos and a section for editor’s picks – usually containing the most creative videos doing the rounds. As you scroll through them, Vine will automatically play the video currently on your screen on a loop, with no play or pause button in sight.

As you’d expect from a sister app of Twitter, you can follow users to be kept up to date with what they post, and rack up followers of your own. To help your numbers, you can see at a glance which of your Twitter followers are on Vine, as well as search for users by email or name.

verdict

Vine is still in its early stages but it’s already showing great potential in the creativity people can squeeze into six seconds. It certainly rattled Facebook’s cage (the social network put a stop to people being able to search for Facebook friends on Vine), but the question is whether it can keep up its popularity past the first few weeks of release buzz and become a must-have app. Only time will tell.