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Vine: Data Compression Applied to the Human Experience

Posted on January 28, 2013. Filed under: startups, venture capital |

Some quickly scribbled thoughts on Vine:

1)   for those who think it’s a flash in the pan, think again, here to stay, and maybe as important to Twitter as Youtube was to Google

2)   the amount of information transmittable in a Vine feels higher than any other unit of shareable data that exists…period.  At it’s core, vine feels like a data compression technology where the human eye/brain can read compressed format…the time that lapses inbetween shots is extraneous and unneeded in the creators story…by editing in the content creation flow, a user can tell an hour long story in six seconds if she chooses the right frames/sign posts to capture

3)   There seem to be two primary applications of this compression technology…one is a horizontal view into a single moment and the second is a linear view through time across moments…the first does not leverage vine’s unique compression capability nearly as well as the second.  Sure, you can fit more of the story about what’s going on in a given moment in your environment if you can stitch together multiple images of every angle and dimension of your surroundings…but the result is maybe a 2/1 compressed view of a 360 degree 6 second video clip…the second, however, is staggering…if a photo answers the question “what were you doing at a point in time” vine answers the question “what were you doing through time?”

4)   I think our minds are wired to make inferences and fill in the blanks of what occurred between frames within vine…and a shared context and brain function between the viewer and creator of the vine enables the creator to tell a full story while skipping the “assumed” details…it’s as though the recipient of a vine has cached a local copy of the human experience in their own brain, and thus only needs to “pull down” and “stream” the dynamic stuff that is changing based on the creator’s individual experience

5)   The aggregations of the vineapp that have been popping up like: justvined.com and http://vinepeek.com/ are fascinating.  They are the window into human experience that I wanted chatroulette to be, and that Youtube bills itself as when highly edited and culled down into fundamental moments…the amount of nuanced human experience consumable per second within these aggregations is so large and dense…I almost believe if I stare long enough I will see the world in it’s entirety from every perspective of the 7 Billion node network of biological sensors (people) using machine sensors (video) to document time and space.

6)   I think the app poses as great or greater a threat to text than it does to photos…this is not an instagram killer…vine’s don’t capture beautiful moments…this is a tumblr/wordpress killer…vine’s tell stories in a way that text/image publishing platforms do…only they are much more efficient and lower commit for the publisher…

7)   I’m not sure how defensible the start/stop mechanic is on the video tool, but what’s lost in defensibility is gained in distribution through twitter…will be interesting to see how Youtube responds…will they make an app that’s focused on the creation side of the video experience…will it use the same mechanic?

8)   If the tweet lowered the commitment to create textual content and created a new sphere of publishers not seen by blogging platfroms, the vine feels like a similar disruption to traditional video capture/publishing

9)   Vine = data compression of human experience into a shareable and consumable unit that vastly increases the volume of transmittable information consumable by a human in a unit of time

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