One year on, Twitter's video app has introduced a new form of social networking – and an entirely new creative medium

It is one year since the video social network Vine made its debut on the iOS app store. In that time, the app has acquired over 40 million users, including the President of the United States, sparked a flurry of imitators, and arguably invented an entirely new creative medium.

By limiting users to sharing videos no more than six seconds in length, requiring that those videos be shot on a mobile phone and, at least to begin with, offering no editing functionality beyond scrapping it all and starting again, Vine brought about a new type of filmmaking. The best of the app is a hyperkinetic mixture of sketches, stunts, in-jokes and pratfalls, presented in an infinite stream of six-second chunks.

But despite this success, the first question anyone asks when they hear about Vine hasn't changed: why on Earth would anyone make a video-sharing app that limits clips to six seconds?

"We knew from the start that the videos needed to be brief," explains Vine's co-founder Colin Kroll, "for creative reasons, technical reasons, and attention reasons. Over two months, we tested variations of the size, from 10 seconds down to five seconds, and we went for six because it just feels right."

"It turned out to be right, you know. The quote from Robert de Niro that 'you can tell a whole story in six seconds' really sums up my feeling about the length."





Nash Grier, Vine superstar.

It's a lesson clearly learned from Twitter, whose own 140-character limit initially began as a mere technical necessity – to allow for the message, a 23-character username, a colon and a space to fit in one 165-character SMS message – but soon grew into something else entirely.

That shared approach, that from constraint comes creativity, perhaps explains Twitter's interest in the company, which led to an acquisition in October 2012.

Even in buyout-heavy Silicon Valley, the acquisition was a little odd, as it predated the launch of Vine's product by more than three months (Twitter Buys Vine, a Video Clip Company That Never Launched, reads one contemporaneous headline). But Kroll, who had started the company just four months before with co-founders Dom Hofmann and Rus Yusupov, says that they weren't unhappy to lose the shot at developing an independent identity.

"We felt that video was on the brink of becoming this new medium that everyone would use, in the same way that photos had become that medium over the previous fifteen years… We wanted to get big fast, we wanted to get this out in the world and let people connect in this way. I think it worked out really well."

The launch itself didn't go entirely smoothly. In the first week, hardcore porn was added to the editor's picks section of the app, which showed up on the main feed of every user. Vine apologised, citing "human error", and scrambled to get content filters up and running. "Obviously a mistake will happen," says Kroll, "but we are very serious about adding those controls, and we continually improve them.

"For example, users can report content which is inappropriate that they find on the network. There's a content review team which is a growing part of Vine, that reviews that content every day to try and make it a very safe environment."

A new community

As users figured out what worked and what didn't on Vine, a common vocabulary of rapid cuts, non sequiturs, and running jokes began to emerge. The best practitioners were elevated first to internet fame, and then to actual fame.

Nash Grier has 5 million followers, more than any other user on Vine. His videos – the most recent features him confessing his love to a sandwich – have landed him a profile in the Mail. When he visited Iceland in January with Jerome Jarre, another power user with over 4 million followers whose most recent video is of a fellow passenger on Icelandair picking her nose, the pair were mobbed by wild fans. The shopping mall hosting their visit was forced to close for their safety.

Grier is also just 16 years old. Every Vine he's ever posted totals less than 20 minutes' combined footage.







Jerome Jarre, Vine star.

Not one of the top 10 users of Vine had a public profile before they started posting on the app; in fact, the most popular user who doesn't owe their fame entirely to the app is the rapper Tyler The Creator, with more than 2 million followers. There are 22 Vine stars with more followers than him, almost all of whom fit broadly in the category of "comedians".

Perhaps because of this organic community, the stars of Vine are an incredibly diverse group. It's by no means perfect – nine of the top 10 users are male, and nine of the top 10 are white – but compared with the line-up of the average sketch show, it's a world apart.

And diversity sells. Twitter itself, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, has been "moving to capitalise on its demographics", since the social network boasts a significantly less homogenous userbase than competing sites such as Facebook. But Kroll says that commercial pressures aren't at the front of his mind; Vine's diversity is a happy accident.

"We definitely don't chase after it. In fact it's been an interesting organic direction that the platform has taken… Vine is uniquely democratic and a level playing-field in video that's just not been there, and there's clearly a thirst for that in this generation.

"Video is the most intimate medium for communication. I think that these users feel that they know each other just by watching each other, and you see many of them meet and collaborate openly together."

"We have that luxury"

It's not surprising that commercial pressures don't factor into Vine's decisions. The company remains sheltered by Twitter, and has been left alone to focus on building its product and community – "driving the best possible experience for our users", in Kroll's words.

But the diverse, youthful demographic is too much for advertisers to ignore, and already brands have been proactively adopting Vine. Virgin Mobile commissioned a thirty-second TV commercial made out of user generated Vines in July, and Dunkin Donuts ran a single Vine as a commercial in September.





A Dunkin Donuts ad on Vine.

"Sure there's been brands that have adopted the platform proactively, and the results have been really interesting… but going back to Twitter, we have that luxury. We can do well by our users."

The priority right now is sorting out Vine's discovery tools, easing new users in to the community. It's a problem Twitter has as well, with chief executive Dick Costolo admitting in November that the site remains "confusing and opaque" to first-time visitors.

Kroll cites channels, which group popular posts by theme, as one way Vine is attempting to leap those hurdles. Those channels might be a shock to the system for anyone from old media – "cats " and "dogs" each have their own channel, while "news and politics" is combined into one channel – but they make idly browsing the service far more enjoyable.

Of course, content discovery was the source of Vine's first big mistake, but Kroll insists that the safety of its users is "at the top of our priority list". A year on, hopefully the company will have a bit more luck, and bit less porn.

• In the future, everyone can be famous for six seconds