Tech journalists spent Thursday playing with, writing about, and reviewing Twitter’s clever and simple new system for video posts, Vine. But academics are keenly interested in Vine too, saying the extreme constraints it imposes on video could produce an explosion in video sharing.
There’s big potential in Vine, say the two experts in online socialization we spoke to, but it’s unclear how, and how often, people will use the six-second video service.
“My guess, given the enthusiasm for Twitter so far, is that people are going to do really cool things,” says Scott Klemmer, who co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction Group at Stanford University. “One of the things we know about creativity is that constraints are essential for getting people to do creative stuff. If you come up with the right constraints, that’s a benefit, not a drawback. And nobody knows that better than Twitter, where their 140-character constraint really created a whole new medium in a lot of ways.”
via Wired
