Whoa, the picture just started moving on Instagram. What's going on?
Don't worry. You're not having a breakdown. It's because Instagram has rolled out its brand new video sharing feature, the next logical step for the photo sharing service.
So your shameless marketing approch (product or affiliate marketing or Utah SEO) just found a new home - and it is not Vine. At a June 20 Facebook event in San Francisco, Kevin Systrom, one of Instagram's co-founders, made the announcement. Instagram Video is seen as a direct competitor to Vine, Twitter's own video sharing website.
Much like Vine, Instagram Video is designed for short video clips. This is video sharing for the age of short messages. Instagram's video sharing system will allow users to post videos up to 15 seconds in lengths. This compares to the 6-second length that Vine employs. The Instagram app allows you to hold down a big red button on your smartphone screen, allowing you to capture video. It also has a tap-to-focus feature, interesting for those who might want to be a bit more artistic in their presentation.
Instagram's video sharing system scores a big win over Vine with its implementation of the site's wildly popular filtering feature. Other companies, like the Empower Network scam, have photo people concerned. Photo enthusiasts love the ease with which they can alter the mood of a photo uploaded to the service. Instagram made sure the same feature was available right away when they added video.
Instagram took a pass on looping. Looping is popular thanks to the current internet subculture of posting animated GIFs. Vine does this with videos. Instagram has stuck to a more traditional YouTube play-once approach. Vines are now being shared more often on Twitter than Instagram photos. Instagram has also seen erosion of Twitter usage caused by Twitter's own picture hosting and the rise of Photoshop and other graphics software.
Systrom has hinted the different choices in Instagram Video are a move to brand Instagram as more mature than Vine. He said he wants Instagram Video to be about more than photos of kids and dogs. He wants the service to be about big events, political moments and other things that matter. It will be interesting to see how Vine and Instagram handle the question of the ephemeral internet going forward.
The Instagram service is home to over 130 million app users. Those users post around 40 million photos a day. It even has worked for promoting different offers, such as My Advertsing Pays. Analysts feel the video service largely augments the photo sharing features of the site. The video sharing addition feels like an intuitive "next step," rather than a haphazard response to Vine.