“We tried a ton of different lengths. We started with five, we went down to four, we actually went down to less than four for a day, which was insane. At one point we had unlimited. We tried all sorts of different lengths, and six was just the sweet spot: it didn’t take too long to create, didn’t take too long to download and didn’t take too long to watch. Everything made sense.”
Constraints lead to creativity, says Hofmann: “It encourages people to cut out the fat and communicate the crux of what they’re trying to say. There's a great quote by Orson Welles that sums up what we were trying to achieve with Vine's functionality: ‘The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.’” So an Instagram-style 15 seconds per clip was never on the cards for Vine? “Six felt perfect. And it still does.”
The other unique feature of Vine is its looping feature; where Instagram’s mini-videos play just once, Vine clips automatically loop – giving them an almost GIF-like feel. Users have already taken advantage of this feature to create perfect, infinitely looping Vines like this one from user Charlie Love.
Hofmann, who says the Vine team worked very hard at getting the looping to work seamlessly, reckons the appeal of looping Vines lies in the fact that they're short snippets – just like memories. “Memories play on repeat, so why not replay it for you? Why force someone to press a button over and over again? I think that’s one of the things that makes Vine what it is.”
Top image credit: Leo Prieto
