Aurora's Blog

I’ve been a little pushed to the edge by the Instagram crowd.

I’ll fully admit, I don’t really super use either service. We all know I’m a twitter girl through and through. (Follow me @AurorasBlog!)

(Speaking of twitter, wasn’t it only about 6 months ago that we were having a twitter vs. Instagram brouhaha?)

Even though I’m not a big user of either, I do have both an Instagram and a Vine. (AurorasBlog on both.)

(I only have a handful of photos and followers on Instagram, and I have yet to post a Vine.)

But, I love watching Vines. (If you’re not following Ry Doon, you should be.)

Some people have really mastered Vine. It’s made Will Sasso way more famous than I ever thought he was before. (I found Ry Doon back when he had 30-thousand something followers… It feels nice when you get in on a little secret before everyone else.)

And now I’ve been hearing lots of people talking about how vine must be slipping celebrities money or something since a bunch of them have immediately jumped to team Vine.

Guess what? They are not defending Vine because there is some big conspiracy. They are defending Vine because they’ve learned how to harness it as a wonderful creative outlet, and the are famous, happy, and heard over there!

If I had people flocking to me on a certain platform, with my livelihood partly coming from my popularity on there, and that platform was threatened to become obsolete, of course I’d be adding my voice to the chorus of people who love that platform! That’s common sense, not a conspiracy.

Some popular Vine-ers have made 15-second instagram videos that are as boring as they could possibly make them to show that longer videos don’t necessarily mean better videos. Then, there are all these commenters jumping on. “You know the videos don’t have to be 15 seconds, right?”

Of course they know! They are making a point/a joke.

Also, I don’t really understand why people like a platform that was made for a particular thing expanding to include another thing – when we already have a million platforms for that other thing. Want to watch videos? Vine, Vimeo, YouTube, and Waywire all have mobile apps that let you upload video from your mobile device.

Want to share pictures in real time? Well, you can do it on twitter. I guess you can do that on Facebook. (Of course neither of those services are specifically tailor-made to that.)

I know Flickr and Photobucket have mobile apps. I always thought of those as more places where you make albums and organize photos. But I’m not a huge social media buff, so maybe people also use them to post pictures in real time.

My point is, we have many well known apps and sites specifically made for video. We have one main well-known site (that I know of) that most people use when it comes to specifically (and mostly in real time) sharing their photos.

Change and innovation are great things. But why over-saturate another market when you have your market cornered?

Well, I’ll tell you why. Because as soon as people found out instagram had video, #RIPVine and #ByeVine started showing up everywhere!

What? The crazy part is, these tweets, photos, and videos weren’t coming from people who found Vine to be a chore in the first place. Many were coming from people who prefaced the hashtag with the fact that they liked vine or would miss it, or miss certain Vine-ers.

Well, guess what, everyone who said that? You don’t have to miss Vine! You can just keep it! At this point, Instagram had had video for less than a day! You trust instagram that much? They announce they now have videos, and you trust it’s gonna be perfect and wonderful. So, let’s just immediately get rid of Vine before seeing how this all plays out?

I hope Vine sticks around. (And I think it will.) Vine has definitely helped create sort of a new kind of comedy for people to make really entertaining videos in only 6 seconds. I’m a little intimidated by Vine. But, I think it’s a great challenge. And I love the people who use it well.

#TeamVine!

(And I’m not alone. Some people at TechCrunch also pretty much seem to be on #TeamVine!)

(By the way, know what’s great about Vine? Someone summed much of the Instagram/Vine thing in 6 seconds.)

How do you feel about it all? Are you on a team?