#TeamVine: Instagram Has Video Now, but Not a Video-Making Culture
If you post videos on Instagram, I'm judging you. 🙉 #TeamVine
-- Morgan Savage (@morgan_savage) June 20, 2013
Instagram, i.e. Facebook, announced that users of the photo-sharing service can now make 15-second videos in the latest version of the app. The move was widely perceived as an encroachment on the short-video territory occupied by Vine, the Twitter-owned service.
Technically, Instagram video is impressive. Videos can be software stabilized or filtered, and they load in a user's timeline relatively quickly. In initial testing, the tool works well and as expected.
People are comparing the Vine's and Instagram's feature set, which makes sense. But Vine has developed a culture that's weird, young, and funny. "The vernacular video format emerging on Vine, stuff in the "most popular" list, is fascinating," BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin said yesterday. "That pop art form took no time to develop."
Over on Twitter, the hashtag #TeamVine has actually taken off, as Huffington Post's Craig Kanalley pointed out. About a dozen people a minute are swearing allegiance to Vine in the wake of the Instagram announcement. There is a self-conscious community of users who believe that a Vine is not any six-second video; it's a Vine. And those who like Vines are happy to defend their short video form from Instagram interlopers.
Instagram, too, has a culture all its own. But it's based on sharing a different kind of media. They've compressed their mission as "to capture and share the world's moments." Will 15-second videos really fit into that culture, or will it feel inappropriate, alien even? Especially when Vine got the jump in defining what short videos are supposed to be.
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