Features

By Melanie Harrington

Staff Writer

We’ve all heard of Snapchat, right? Well in June 2012 a new mobile app similar to Snapchat was born.

Vine allows users to make videos — no more than 6 seconds long — and upload them to different social networking sites, as well as send them to their friends and family. Because the video is taken by rapidly pressing the screen, it creates it an animated gif effect.

Just like Snapchat, it allows people to share brief snippets of their life. But unlike Snapchat, the video doesn’t delete itself automatically. Twitter, Inc. bought the program in October, and made it available to the public on January 24, 2013 .

The videos can be sent privately, but can also be posted online — and videos that come straight from Vine are not moderated. A week after its debut, risque pictures kept popping up from different users. One was even listed under “Editor’s Picks.”

Twitter blamed this on “human error”. However, pornographic content violates Apple’s terms of service, and on February 5 of this year Twitter raised the minimum age limit for Vine from 12 to 17, as requested by Apple .

Is Vine a trend at SLA? Most students who were asked, did not know what Vine was. They had never even heard of it before! But there are few who have heard of Vine and use it quite frequently. Some students use Vine as a way to check up on what’s going on in other people’s lives, others use it for it’s convenience or for fun.

Sophomore Dylan Long says, “It’s a unique way to show people what you’re doing. I use it for recreational use like when I’m with my friends or when I’m at a concert.”

Although Long admits that he thinks Vine is unique and values it for it’s cool effects, he doesn’t think it’s addicting at all. Senior Christian Gelbolingo disagrees.

“I am completely obsessed,” says Gelbolingo, “Unfortunately it’s only available for the iPhone.”

While Gelbolingo may be obsessed, he doesn’t upload a video every day.

“That would just get annoying,” he says.

Instead he uses it to check up on his friends and to watch what other people have uploaded.

Lately there has seemed to be a new thing with trending apps. When a new app appears, people use it all the time, even if it means sharing more information about themselves than they would normally.

Even Gelbolingo admits this might not be the best idea.

“I’m interested to see if it sticks around, or if we’ll all just wake up a couple of months from now and wonder what the hell were we thinking,” he confessed.