Released just under four weeks ago, Twitter’s Vine app is now the quickest growing social media apps on iOS and Android devices, allowing users to easily create and post six second video clips with the simple touch of a finger.
Fashion makers have long been on the forefront of new technologies as the early adapters and often trendsetters for popular apps and social media. Brands like Target and H&M were among the first companies in 2007 to use Facebook groups and later pages to reach out to their loyal fashion followings, and Twitter and Tumblr have become a mainstay for the fashion elite to blog, post, tweet, what have you, a throng of mid-America style addicts.
New York Fashion Week ’13 brought about another new social fashion crazy that is changing the way brands, and other industries for that matter, use viral social posting for their event marketing. NYFW is one of the highest attended and largest press free-for-all in the world, with thousands of junior fashionistas dying for a ticket into the exclusive events. Up until five years ago, the exclusivity of the buyer only crowds created barriers for brands looking to be a cult phenomenon for the future generations of money spenders.
The advent of smartphones meant brands could now live update via Facebook and Twitter to those ticket-less masses with real-time photo uploads and backstage tweeting. Even popular phone apps like Instagram and Tumblr created easier avenues for consumers to get a first person view of the catwalks. But this year, the early release of a new viral app allowed those lucky enough to score a house seat to share the runway as it was happening.
Vine, a new mobile service that lets you create and share beautiful, short looping videos, follows the logic of parent company Twitter’s micro-missives and people’s attraction to stricter formal limitations in social sharing. Vine’s technology allows users to post super-short clips with unlimited cuts (basically six second max videos) which loop infinitely (like GIFs). The results are often charming — more textured and atmospheric than Twitter pics, but still lightweight and browsable.
Just like tweets, Vine supports the popular hashtag sharing model and the ability to tag other @Vine users, practically modeling the Twitter app. The #NYFW tag saw hundreds of uploads just days after the app released on to the market with 100,000 uploads the first weekend alone.
That said, Vine has clearly quickly attained a high profile among prominent social media users, celebrities and major brands: Among those who have picked up the app include everyone from Paul McCartney (the Beatle) to Jimmy Fallon to Gap. News organizations have also tested it out, including CNN and NBC New York.
After just four weeks, Vine creators are already looking to expand the apps abilities working on everything from sharing Vine video posts directly to the Web (rather than Facebook or Twitter), to having the ability to share previously posted videos out again to Facebook and Twitter, as well as easier ways to cancel video uploads. Have you tried Vine?
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