VINE
See and share life’s greatest moments in motion – More like spend hours of your day laughing at your phone and gasping at ridiculous videos!
Since its debut on the app store in January 2013 vine has become a phenomenon in the world of social media, by April 2013 it had become the most downloaded app on the app store and has been at number one many times.
If you don’t know what vine is by now, then you’ve either just come out of a coma or come out from living under a rock. Where have you been for the past year? Do you realise how much you’re missing in your life?
Vine is a free app owned by twitter which lets users make videos for six seconds on a loop and can be shared to social network sites.
I love vine, it has to be one of the best and most used apps on my phone, whether I’m on a train or up at 5am with insomnia I always use vine to fill my boredom. Vine is basically a mixture of Instagram and twitter but a video version. When you first sign up you can either sign in with twitter or you can create a new account using an email address. Now the fun begins!
So by now you have your account set up you might as well quit your job, get a divorce or drop out of university and college because vine will seriously take over your life – it did mine! Vine recently updated the app and has made it much more user friendly so don’t worry if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s pretty easy. With the recent update came brand new settings, I’m loving the fact that you can now make your profile private – “ain’t nobody got time” for people seeing you’re private things! You can now also select from a range of different colours which makes your profile feel a lot more personal now!
The thing I love the most with the new update has got to be the messaging option, you can now send video messages to your friends and to vine users! It’s cool because unlike twitter you never really get to emote how you feel when about your favourite celebrity (cue crying 15 year old girls over Justin Bieber) and with a lot of celebrities jumping on the vine hype, you can now send them a video message telling them how much you love them. Think about it. They can actually see you. Well you and 5 million other followers! Not just that, you can video message your friends or send them funny videos a lot easier now. It’s really easy to share with Facebook and twitter as well so any video you make or like it’s now easy to upload to twitter and Facebook with a couple of taps.
So let’s say you want to record a video click the record button and hold the screen to record, if you want to pause – let go of the screen. Simple.
I say simple because Vine’s new update has made it even more easier to create videos! There are new buttons on the record screen like the grid button to help frame the shot and a focus button so you can easily pinpoint objects you’re filming and lock the focus on them. However you can only use the focus on the front facing camera, so all you video “selfie” lovers will have to do without manual focus! My favourite feature is the “save the clip” button which lets you store the video to come back to later on! For all you people that like to make stop motion videos, you can now select the ghost button which essentially leaves a “ghost” of your last frame so you can line up the next shot from the old one.
However, if you’re like me and severely camera shy *Hah! Get it?* you can just click the explore button from the options and search from hundreds and thousands of videos!
Confused on what to watch - You’re in luck! The new update has added the option of selecting any topic you like from comedy, art and experimental, cats, dogs, family, beauty and fashion, food, health and fitness, nature, music, news and politics, special effects, sports, urban and weird. I usually find comedy to be the best sort of entertainment with the “Vine Celebrities” Britney Furlan and her sketches, Nash Greir and his boyish charm and pranks, Kingbach with his ghetto humour or Jerrome Jarre with his “selfies with strangers” pranks. However if you’re a cat lover (no I’m not judging you) or love special effects then click those options!
If like me you’re just bored and want something to watch you have are “popular now” and “on the rise” which are usually your best source if you want a random selection of videos that are popular or are trending. However if you’re looking for a specific type of video you have the search bar to type in certain hashtags like “selfie” or “prank” to get you what you want.
One of the let downs with Vine is that you can’t add your own videos like you can with Instagram, so if you didn’t use vine and want to share a random moment you caught by accident on your camera, you can’t, unless you record it through the vine app you can’t upload it. I’d like to see an update where that feature is added in because with vine becoming so big it stupid that feature isn’t included? Perhaps you can - and I just haven’t figured it out yet? If anyone reading this knows how to do that, write a comment below or on our Twitter/Facebook pages and let us know!
Another thing that I find a little frustrating is “re-vines” – like twitter and its retweets and with the rise of vine celebrities all the people you love to watch have now started to “re-vine” either adverts or other “viners” that they’re trying to promote. It’s not too bad on twitter because you can scroll easily past a status but with videos they take up the whole screen and then my home page is full of videos of things I have no interest in? Ideally I would like it if there was an option to watch all the people you follow by uploaded videos only not “re-vines” so that way all the things you don’t want to see don’t come up and you could watch just the videos made by them– however that’s just wishful thinking and I’m just being fussy!
Overall I’d say it’s the holy grail of video sharing – but then, perhaps that’s just me! I give it 4 Taps! I love the app but it missed out on 5 taps because of its inability to allow camera videos to be uploaded and with annoying “revine” button – I might regret that if things are changed when it updates again but for now I stand by 4!
Go check it out on the app store! Get back to us and let us know what you like about the new update and if you’re new to vine let us know how you’re finding it!








