Vine Opens Up For The Web With Public User Profiles and Private Vine Socializing
On Friday, Vine took another step towards becoming a browsable open web site with the official introduction of web-accessible user profiles. For registered Vine users, you now have a web-based home feed and can do the social things you do on the mobile app. However Vine still doesn't have a site designed for full accessibility to non-members. Non-members will either be enticed to join or will continue to encounter random vines whether they know it or not.
Last month Vine began offering custom URLs and it was rumored that they would also be adding individual profile pages.
On Friday Vine announced the expansion of vine.co to allow users to "experience Vine: on the web."
Users can get social on the website and share their publicly available Vine profiles with non-users. In addition, all can browse Vine profile videos in one long stream via "TV Mode."
Vine identifies a sample profile page where you can see the little tv icon in the upper right corner. Click on that for an ongoing flow of vines with the ability to skip forward or back. The larger
It's an important move for an app that's done incredibly well on mobile yet has been largely inaccessible on the web except through individually embedded vines and third party services.
As Emil Protalinski points out at The Next Web:
"Vine for the Web is all about consumption: you currently can’t record videos with your webcam nor can you upload videos you have already taken. It’s not clear if Twitter wants to keep Vine focused on mobile or try to bring its apps and the Web version to feature parity."
At the moment, you'll note that the top 10 Google results (at least those delivered to me while being signed out of Google) are from a combination of third party Vine-related services, non-Vine social media accounts and non-Vine media outlets.
It will be interesting to see how Google search results change over the next month or two. The likeliest scenario, especially given Google's tendency to privilege big brands, is that direct Vine links will soon be topping searches. We'll see.
More:
- Vine To Offer Custom URLs Beginning Tomorrow, Custom Google+ URLs Now Available
- How Musicians Are Using Vine To Promote New Music
- Best Of 2013: How Did Riff Raff Become The Video King Of Vine?
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/Facebook) is building a writing hub at Flux Research. To suggest topics about music tech, DIY music biz or music marketing for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
