By setting a hard limit on length, Vine gave the video-making process just enough structure to sustain it. By making it easy to produce video, Vine also made it fun. Instagram didn’t have video yet, nor did Twitter YouTube was best for desktop applications Facebook was still largely text-focused and Snapchat was mostly a messaging service. When Vine debuted, in 2013, it was the first mobile service to make uploading video easy, with very little friction. To butcher a Velvet Underground myth, not a lot of people used Vine, but everyone who did went out and started a YouTube comedy channel. But if you’ve always imagined Vine as a flash-in-the-pan social network populated by nonthreateningly cute teenagers making dumb jokes, you missed out on one of the internet’s weirdest and funniest spaces. To some extent, that’s true - Vine’s biggest stars have mostly moved on to Facebook or YouTube, and many of its functions are now built into the services of its parent company, Twitter. I was just beginning to think that Vinepeek must really mean something, that it could be a kind of anthropological magic door-when someone passed by and scoffed, “This is such a waste of time.To people who’ve never fallen into a productivity hole on Vine, today’s announcement that the video-sharing app would be “discontinued” doesn’t mean much: just another once-popular social network quietly petering out. Life-arbitrary, frivolous, and short-flashes before your eyes. This is how a viewer can remain mesmerized by decidedly unremarkable clips. But its universe gets bigger the longer you look at it, and seconds start to evaporate in the voyeuristic pursuit. “It would evoke the laziest of modern pleasures-channel surfing-except that the time wasted would be painfully underlined.” So, too, with Vinepeek. The installation “would pound viewers with an awareness of how long they’d been languishing in the dark,” Daniel Zalewski wrote in his Profile of Marclay. In this way, it’s reminiscent of “The Clock,” a curated series of film clips assembled for viewing in real time by the artist Christian Marclay. Vinepeek marks time in six-second increments, with the passage of each new post. It’s eavesdropping without consequence-the Internet realizing its potential to build a room where everyone is present but only you know you’re there.Īll this lurking takes time, naturally. I can stare into the little dark box for hours, noting nothing of significance, simply collecting other people’s transmissions of perception. The beauty of Vinepeek, in contrast, is that it offers users the chance to just watch. As Julia Ioffe pointed out in her article about Chatroulette’s teen-age creator, “When you do decide to stop and engage, things can get a little awkward.” Having an unknown person appear on your screen, without any filter or tortured matching algorithm, was a tantalizing prospect, if not necessarily the making of a fulfilling connection. Vinepeek is the innocent nephew of an Internet sensation from 2009: Chatroulette, the online random-partner-assignment video-chat service for adventurous conversationalists and compulsive exhibitionists. (It’s the day the group breaks away from their regular duties for a quick hack job.) As recounted on their blog, the team brainstormed in the morning, had a working prototype by lunch, and, by the end of the day, made it live. David Somers, a software engineer who runs PXi’s development team, thought that plucking Vines from their natural habitat-a Vine or Twitter stream-and stitching them together would make for a good Friday project. When Twitter released Vine, in January, it caught on immediately at PXi Ventures, a tech-start-up incubator based in Shoreditch, in London. Vinepeek turned up only a few days after its namesake. The Web site is not affiliated with Vine on any official basis, but it serves as an endorsement of the video service as a window onto our hyper-documented world. These glimpses of other lives are streamed in random succession, in real time, on Vinepeek, a hub of unmoderated Vines, which are six-second clips captured by the deceptively simple Vine app. Friends cooking bacon, a stop-motion sequence of piling stones, gym class, a guy on the toilet, and, eventually, a cat.
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