FaceVine: The Newest Game Changer in the Social Media War? We Doubt It.
The ongoing battle between Facebook and Twitter over which platform is the Top Social Media Superpower has reached a new plateau: playing copy cat. Facebook announced last week that users can now create hashtags to track various conversation topics. Twitter, of course, has been using hashtags since Day 1.
Since purchasing Instagram for $1 billion earlier this year, Facebook has laid relatively low but has been hinting at the creation of a video sharing component. With Twitter’s recent adoption of video sharing through Vine, Facebook’s brainstorming team was put under pressure to come up with the next greatest thing. Just last week they mailed out rather cryptic invitations to media outlets inviting them to join their team for coffee and a special announcement on June 20th. Although the event isn’t until tomorrow, news about the internal testing of a vine-like application being developed in the glass menagerie at Facebook’s headquarters has left event attendees to assume that this might be the focus of Thursday’s gathering.
The use of images of all sorts has taken social media sharing to an entirely new level. Instagram is used to take pictures, add filters, then post them for friends or account followers. Vine is an application that allows users to record a short video clip (less than 10 seconds) and post it to their Twitter account. Instagram alone had a record 100 million users by September 2012 and continues to gain one new user and post 58 pictures each second. Vine has just recently become popular in the last few months, but already has over 13 million users.
Mark Zuckerberg should take notice. He might just find something like this in his Facebook messages this week:
Dear Facebook:
It is not completely clear how your new video application will differ from Vine, but we can’t imagine it’s all that new:
You shoot it. You post it. You share it. Twitter seems to be the true pioneer of visual social media. Facebook, where’s the originality?
We’re expecting a curve ball Thursday,
Unamused Facebookers