Have you seen yourself on video? You look terrible. And that's just one of the problems.
Ever since its breakout growth became the story of the year, capped with a billion-dollar acquisition by Facebook, everyone is talking about Instagram. The Next Instagram, that is. Naturally, that means video. Like photos, but they move! To the casual observer, building the next big social network around video might appear to be a no-brainer.
As it so happens, Sean Parker, one of the driving forces behind the social network, has chosen to throw his weight behind the most recent addition to the mix: Airtime, also known as "Chatroulette without the dicks." Its launch was perhaps the most-hyped startup event since Color flushed the better part of $41M down the toilet.
Less than a week later, Airtime is far from being the Next Big Thing. The coverage I've seen thus far has mainly focused on how the user base is disproportionately male and kind of seedy (no dicks, eh?), the glitch-filled launch event, or how exactly the penis-detection algorithm works.
Why "Instagram for Video" Makes Absolutely no Sense
It doesn't feel like a stretch to say that we're in a video bubble. In fact, judging by the number of apps that are being billed as the "Instagram of Video" by the tech press — SocialCam and Viddy, Vlix, Boxee, and plenty of others abound — it feels pretty certain we are. But as these upstarts have discovered, video is a fundamentally different medium from photography, and so far no one has been able to replicate Instagram's success. Which raises the question: is a video-based social network really something we need?
I'm not so sure.
Which is quicker: shooting a photo of your cat doing something cute, or filming the same thing? Social networks live and die by user-generated content, and anything that introduces friction to the sharing process poisons the wells. It's just not quick, even in the age of streaming and widespread 3G and LTE networks, to record and upload a high-definition video to the Internet.
Of course, this also applies to the actual consumption of said video once it's been put online. With the exception of accidental videos and outtakes (think Failblog), most videos take more than a few seconds to watch. It's a far cry from a service like Instagram, where a user can quickly scroll through a feed and "like" photos to her heart's content.
There may be something of a happy medium in GIFs. Though nearly as labor intensive to produce as a short video clip, which limits their production, GIFs are inherently just as consumable as photos, as a quick scroll through Cinemagram, which has picked up over a million users in little more than a month, or Tumblr would show.
