So you just downloaded “the Instagram of Video” Vine, but you have no idea what to do with it beyond taking six-second clips of your desk. What now? Has no one figured out how to make art out of this quasi-new medium? Well, if you’re in need of some ideas, new sites Vinepeek and VineRoulette both allow you to witness fans of the service try to capture their everyday lives, all in real time.
Capitalizing on the fact that all Vine videos are public, Vinepeek, a project by product incubator PXi Ventures, is a simple stream of newly posted clips, all ranging from people making and eating their food to puppies barking up a storm at the camera. You know, things that are already almost unbearably popular on every other visual platform. But as each new clip emerges, you’re given a small sense of how popular the app has become. The site has a distinctly hypnotic quality to it, as you’re invited to peer into the lives of complete strangers without any context whatsoever. It’s almost intimate, each clip gives a much more personal feel than any animated GIF ever could muster.
VineRoulette, developed by the folks behind TweetBeam, cuts through the bedlam by visualizing people’s Vines, begging the user to let their inner voyeur run wild. The user is first greeted with a search field, where one can enter tags like #kittens, #love, or #steak. After a few moments loading, the site shows a rather Windows 8-esque array of tiles showing clips corresponding to the search. After awhile, it becomes really hard to leave.
Seriously. We cannot stop ourselves.
While the jury is still out on whether or not Vine will engender a bona fide replacement for the animated GIF, there’s no denying that it’s fun to use, even if we just take videos of our pets pretending to be people. But these sites prove that at the very least, Vine’s going to make it past the launch-week hype.
