New Twitter Tool Vine Shares Short Videos

If you’re about to get shot, do you run or do you take a Vine clip and share it? (Flickr Creative Commons: Nationaal Archief)

Twitter just added a tool called Vine that shares video clips with your followers. Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman thinks Vine could be a good reporting tool, suggesting that bystander coverage of spontaneous events will become even more immediate. The tool only lets you share six-second clips, which you can take all at once or stagnate into different scenes.

Vine CEO Dick Costolo, in a demo clip, shared a video of the entire process of making steak tartare, broken up into second-long scenes. The video continues on a loop until you decide to click out of it. Sonderman also thinks Vine might complicate reporting ethics, especially with sharing graphic clips before considering the consequences.  “[A]lso think of how much more traumatic the bystander documentation of the Empire State Building shooting would have been if the photos of dead victims were instead videos, with action and audio,” he wrote.