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Here’s some light weekend reading for you. World War Z. I read it a few years ago, and found it really fun. A few details: It’s like a documentary about a pandemic, which in this case happens to be a zombie-spawning disease. The book itself is basically a series of short stories, each one an interview with a different character who survived the experience — for example, the former Vice-President of the US, the immigrations officers at the US-Mexican border who has to deal with families smuggling the infected across the border, the woman who has to go and kill the half-alive zombies which are frozen in the tundra. I found each is really interesting.
I was just playing with Vine some more — it’s a pretty elegant implementation, particularly on the browsing side. I feel like the lack of editing tools on the capture side is a little odd. Sometimes you’ll miss your shot or overshoot or whatnot, it almost feels like a destructive capture process, making it really easy to capture the perfect video, all in the name of simplicity. Similarly, there’s not a good affordance for the “press to capture” video interface, requiring you to figure it out organically. That said, I think they nailed the “Instagram for video” concept perfectly — Viddy and SocialCam never made it work.
I feel like the important element of an app like this is in the “Editors picks” — basically the Discover tab in Instagram or Twitter.
I wish there was just a big play button that would let me watch the clips without having to scroll down the timeline.
It definitely has a “well why didn’t I think of that?” quality to it. The Twitter acquisition of course enhances that narrative — they’re already winners in the startup game, their idea has received a very nice level of validation, and now the market is naturally curious what the fuss is about. There’s no way to know what the splash would have been like without Twitter. I’m sure it would be articles comparing it to Viddy and Vimeo and the rest.
INTERFACE NOTES
Over Christmas, I set up my mom’s spam-laden email account with Unroll.me, which consolidates all your bacon* emails and newsletters into a daily digest. I’ve really enjoyed the cleaner inbox, and has helped me to wean off of my every-ten minutes email addiction. Highly recommended that you try it out. It’s free, too.
