Vine is one of the newest social media apps.  It allows users to capture post and view videos.  All the videos on vine are limited to six seconds in length.

The people who use vine make it appealing. Vine is a medium for expression that differentiates from other forms of social media by having only six second videos. In comparison, Twitter has tweets, pictures and videos while Facebook has much more such as information and messaging. Its simplicity and constraints are what makes it palatable.

Some may see the six second time limit is too short or too constrictive to allow proper expression, but in the words of Orson Welles, a recognized actor and director, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitation.”

To make a Vine, one must hold one’s finger on the screen to record, and lift to stop recording.  Several different scenes can be captured using this system because it goes from one clip to the next immediately allowing users to tell short stories.

The app gets information out concisely and quickly.  For example, when trains broke down in San Francisco, it was documented on Vine before transportation officials even explained what was going on.

It also provides a way for grassroots news to be distributed instantaneously to the entire world, without editors, censors or time for printing and typing.  Ten seconds after something happens, everyone in the world is able to see it, or six seconds at least.

Other websites use vine to supply their content, and more often the purposes of the websites is to watch vines.  One example of these websites includes vinecats.com, which contains vines of cats. Ano0ther is vinepeek.com, which shows every vine being uploaded at whichever point in time a user chooses to visit the site.

“It’s fun and entertaining,” says Connor Browne, a senior at Glen Rock High School, who is a frequent user of Vine. “It’s easy to use and different from all the other social media apps.” This sentiment is widely held by members of his societal ilk.

“I know a lot of people who use it… A lot of famous people too,” said Senior Michael Rodgers, another user of Vine.

Videos made with vine are closer to gifs sound than actual videos.  Gifs are just frames of selected pictures played in a sort of super-speed slideshow that gives the illusion of movement, much like those flipbooks made of post-it notes that children make.

Similar to twitter, Vine allows followers, likes and revines, paralleling twitters own system of followers, favorites and retweets.  The vast majority of Vine users log on every day or at least every-other-day, making it a relevant and important social application.

There are many fads that emanate from the social media sector and many apps do not catch on.  Vine has more than caught on; it has become the single largest video sharing service in the entire world.  Larger than Facebook, larger than Instagram, even larger than YouTube, if we’re going only by the number of videos uploaded.  Vine is a step in a new direction for all of social media and it would be a very big surprise if its influence is not present in almost all social media apps.