Jumat, 25 Januari 2013

Twisted Vine: As Twitter Pursues Amplifiers, It's Becoming Noisier

Twisted Vine: As Twitter Pursues Amplifiers, It's Becoming Noisier

Twitter launched the Vine Make-a-Scene app for iOS yesterday. Vine, a three person startup just acquired by Twitter (or acqui-hired, as the case may be) has created an easy way to make and share fun little six-second video loops. These are sore of like the omnipresent animated GIFs that are looping all of the webâ€"but somewhat longer and noisier. Here’s an amusing example:

If the first phase of Twitter’s evolution was about simplifying the idea of what a social media product could be and building a massive audience (which, unquestionably, it has done exceptionally well), the second phase is about monetizing, turning all of that engagement into dollars. This part is a work in progressâ€"and a lens through which to look at what the company rolls out. So I have been surprised that the coverage of Vine has sidestepped the deeper why in favor of the hackneyed “Instagram of video” analogies. There is a deeper why to Facebook‘s interest in Instagram, too, that involves encouraging the sharing of lots of highly particularized information that can lead to better ad targeting (and even ad creative, if users hadn’t freaked out!) which has not been much discussed, either.

But if you are a Twitter user, not an advertiser, why should you care? Well, for one, the Twitter experience is changing in response to monetization, and in ways that you may or may not like. Vine is the most recent example, but in general, on many sensory levels, Twitter is becoming noisier.

Sensory Overload: The biggest design decision that I noticed about Vine is the inclusion of ambient sound. When you shoot your little video clips, whatever sound is going on becomes part of the video. Certainly this can and will be used creatively, but it will also lead to a lot of unintended audio information (and perhaps embarrassment!) because users do not yet think of Twitter as an audio environment or of “micro-animations” (like GIFs) as an audio medium.

More than Viddy or SocialCam, Vine’s Make-a-Scene (don’t search on the app store for simply “Vine”â€"you won’t find it!) reminds me Lightt (with two “t”s), an app that I wrote about when it launched in October. Lightt compresses ten seconds of life into a silent one second animation. You can chain these animations together when you share them to make longer sequences, but by comparison, Vine’s six seconds feels long! The concept of compression is similar, though, and very in keeping with the terseness of Twitter’s mission.

Part of the Twitter “Player Card” specification is that media does not auto-play when you “expand media” on a tweet. But Twitter is testing a home field advantage for Vine, so when you expand a tweet with a Vine video embedded, the media does auto-play, but with the sound defaulted to mute. When you view Vine videos within the mobile app itself, the sound is on by default. A nice user interface detail on the mobile app is that although the videos autoplay (with sound) when you pause in your scrolling to land on one, the sound stops as soon as you scroll beyond it (out of sight, out of ear!)

What’s significant here is that part of Twitter’s simplicity has been its lack of sensory bandwidth demands on the user. Yes, you do have to work a bit at decoding some of the more arcane tweets, but it never feels like it’s shouting at you. This is about to change. When I say that Twitter is testing auto-play (sound off) with Vine, I mean that it will likely be testing all kinds of other defaults trying to determine where the user’s comfort level is.

Not So Hidden Agenda: OK, why the testing, why the pushing of envelopes? I think advertising is the obvious answer. Twitter cards are not for the hoi polloi, they require explicit deals, approval, and likely payment. They are an obvious advertising medium. Disseminating targeted links to external websites is a good marketing goal, but success is based on how many people actually click, and response rate for web ads, and particularly mobile ads, are spectacularly low. It’s hard to generate a lot of revenue from badly performing ads.

This is where the appeal of inline content for advertising comes in. A recent campaign by ESPN with video service provider Ooyala placed 15 second pre-roll adds on select SportsCenter video clips in tweets from @ESPNCFB, like this one about the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax story:

Particularly on mobile where it’s hard to get people to click on ads that will interrupt their experience, ads attached to inline media will get watched, and, if they are targeted properly, without much annoyance to the viewer. Even better, of course, from the advertising perspective, would be ads that auto-play with sound as you scroll through your tweets, but how to get from the mute Twitter timeline to something more like television?

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