You’d think Twitter cofounder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey would be a whiz at social media. But his posts to Twitter’s young video-sharing service Vine are a mix of weirdly creepy and just-plain-boring clips.

Vine launched in January and carries an official description in the iOS app store as “the best way to see and share life in motion.” The app appears to have had a profound effect on Dorsey.

Back in late April, Dorsey admitted that he has a hard time simply taking pictures anymore and thinks Vine’s 6-second videos have changed how he sees art. He said: “I think it’s an entirely new art form, and I think it’s amazing — every picture I look at right now, I want it to move; I’m waiting for it to move. Where’s the sound?”

But Dorsey doesn’t appear to know what’s worth capturing in motion, and sometimes he’s being downright creepy.

I’ll be the first admit that I’m not that great at Vine. We all can’t be majestic Vine artists. But I don’t post Vines often, and I certainly don’t spam my Twitter followers with Vine videos because I’m bored.

For example, just today Dorsey has posted three relatively dull Vines from the same plane window:

A cursory look through Dorsey’s other Vine videos isn’t much better. Often he takes Vines where a picture would have been sufficient. Instead of a snapshot of a moment, we’re subjected to 6 seconds of some ho-hum event.

Here’s Dorsey standing in a line:

Here’s Dorsey showing off the “energy” of the Square NY office:

Here’s Dorsey looking at a street in Manhattan:

Here’s Dorsey looking at some “street art”:

Here’s Dorsey in a cab:

And then there are these creepy Vines, where Dorsey looks into the camera and captures other people behind him:

Occasionally, Dorsey does use Vine in a way that goes with the spirit of the service.

It’d be nice to see Dorsey post more Vines like these. We’re wishing you luck, Jack.

Top screenshot via Jack Dorsey/Vine

“We may be witnessing the rise of Twitter’s recently acquired Vine,” Compete.com’s Conor O’Mahony said in an email.

Source: Compete.com

Fast movers for April 2013

Vine, which bills itself as “the best way to see and share life in motion,” was acquired by Twitter for $30 million in October of 2012, when it had only three employees. The site is essentially a combination of a video-based Instagram and Twitter, as users upload short 6-second videos and share them with friends.

Two million unique visitors is not huge, of course, although it is significant. But it’s important to note that many users who access Vine solely via mobile will not be counted, and that this is a momentum signal, not a sign that Vine is already at Twitter- or Facebook-style reach.

Vine, which has had some challenges lately due to copyright violations and hardcore porn appearing as an editor’s pick, is ideally suited to grow fast simply due to the fact that Twitter owns it … and can feature it more prominently in users’ tweet streams whenever it wishes. Twitter has already signaled with Twitter #Music that it intends to go full-media and extend what has largely been a textual medium into music and other media.

Other top sites included MLB.com — as baseball season hits — and Boston.com, for reasons too obvious and painful to mention. Java.com and Adobe.com hit the fast mover’s list simply due to new software updates.

photo credit: mclcbooks via photopin cc

Put on your guessing cap because Bethesda Softworks has something new it wants to show off.

The developer responsible for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 3 is teasing its next game on Vine. The Twitter video app enables users to post video clips of up to six seconds in length. Bethesda posted a short clip of barbed wire followed by records spinning on a turntable.

Bethesda senior producer Jason Bergman retweeted the Vine with the message: “Consider yourself teased.”

The records featured in the clip include “Planned program service. Program no. 416″ by the Moonbeam Trio and “Air on the G-string,” an arrangement based on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major. Bach composed that piece in the 18th century. The Moonbeam Trio album is apparently rare, but the U.S. Library of Congress has a copy. It includes songs like “I cannot sing the old songs,” which was originally composed in 1868.

Check out the Vine for yourself and hazard your guess in the comments:

Despite the allusions to old-timey music, the clip is not teasing a new Fallout game. The Fallout series is known for its use of classic tunes to set up its atmosphere, but Bethesda producer Pete Hines confirmed the Vine is not Fallout related.

@aegies You talking about the Vine thing? Guess again

— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) April 16, 2013

We’ve reached out to Bethesda to ask them to explain their madness. We’ll update with any new information.

Yesterday, Bethesda announced that it is done with development on Skyrim. It will still support the title, but it is moving the bulk of its workforce to its next project.

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Vine may be the latest and greatest video sharing app, but don’t count musician Prince among those singing its praises.

NPG Records, Prince’s record label, recently sent a takedown request to Twitter over  eight “unauthorized recordings” and “unauthorized synchronizations” posted to Vine, as The Next Web reports.

The request, sent on March 22, is one of the first sent to Twitter over its new video sharing service, which was only launched in January. That’s a lot of trouble for eight six-second clips.

Maybe Prince is just too demanding?

The move, however, is not particularly new to Prince, who has gone out of his way to tackle unauthorized recordings of his performances, songs, and image. One major target — and for good reason — has been YouTube, which Prince has long accused of being willfuly ineffective when it comes to removing unathorized videos.

“They are clearly able [to] filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success,” Prince told Reuters in 2007.

Slightly more intense was Prince’s not-at-all hypocritical decision to record a live version of Radiohead’s “Creep” and yank all fan recordings of the performance from YouTube. Radiohead wasn’t crazy about that particular move, and requested that YouTube restore the videos. (Radiohead eventually won that battle, though you wouldn’t think so after searching YouTube.)

While takedown requests are never “good” this latest one should at least be a promising sign for for Vine, which has clearly gotten large enough warrant attention from Prince.

As for Prince himself — well, today news is further proof that he’s an analog man alone in a digital world so cold.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Mass Relevance, a startup that brings calm to a crazy sea of social activity, is rolling out a new digital mosaic product today at SXSW that essentially builds an image using tweets, Facebook updates, photos, and even Vine videos.

You may have seen Mass Relevance’s platform and not even known it, as it’s been used several times to help manage the flow of tweets for broadcast television or streaming events, such as President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall. The company’s technology allows its clients to manage a list of questions sent to someone on stage or on camera, conduct polling in real-time, display a stream of the best social updates, and much more. In fact, Mass Relevance has even been powering the Q&A sessions at SXSW, which has netted the company compliments by nearly everyone on stage who has used it.

The new digital mosaic (called Dynamic Mosaic) integrates real-time social content from multiple sources — including content from Instagram, Facebook, Vine, Twitter, and Google+ – that automatically curates the stream of activity into something that’s visually pleasing and digestible to an audience. Brands that use the company’s new product have control over the experience, too. That means they can choose to flow sponsored and specific accounts to the foreground to promote messages, sponsors, and personalities. (Check out an example here.)

“Social curation and re-display is still very much a new frontier,” Mass Relevance founder and CEO Sam Decker told VentureBeat. “Social integration is typically approached in two ways:  1) Highlighting the content itself, for example a stream of Facebook posts and Tweets, or a photo wall of Instagram content, or 2) … not necessarily show[ing] the content itself, but rather visualiz[ing] how social conversations are trending by criteria like volume, keyword mentions, or geography.”

When I heard about Dynamic Mosaic, I immediately thought of a socially curated mass of content that would be displayed in the form of Abraham Lincoln, but apparently this isn’t the case with Mass Relevance’s new tool.

The mosaic flows from left to right, allowing about 2 seconds for photos to be paused and 6 seconds for automatically played vine videos.

The Dynamic Mosaic is the first platform to really show the market potential of Vine, the short-video social network that Twitter purchased a few months ago. Within days of the acquisition, Decker said, Mass Relevance’s platform was able to source, curate, and re-display Tweets in real-time that had Vine-embedded videos.

“What’s particularly interesting about how they are displayed within the Dynamic Mosaic is the way the experience automatically detects when Vine videos are embedded,” Decker said. “The motion of the experience will slow down to allow the video to play before streaming to the next piece of content — whether it be a Tweet, another video, or photo.”

Decker said there’s a huge opportunity for Vine:

“It’s more about the opportunity that Vine holds for major brands using the platform to create social experiences within their ‘owned’ digital properties. Now, major brands can leverage real-time video sharing gaining fast adoption within the market. The main difference between Vine and other social video clips is really the brevity — you’re only allowed 6 seconds. The short length of Vine videos force the user to focus on creativity with a less-is-more mentality. … What’s more, Vine is easily integrated into a platform and device where consumers are already spending increasingly long amounts of time — Twitter and mobile respectively. The sharability factor is high, as followers can quickly consume and amplify Vine videos throughout the social sphere.

One of the first clients to use the new Dynamic Mosaic will be IMAX, which is planning to show off a socially driven mosaic experience during SXSW’s Film Intermission party, with a video clip of its mosaic in action to go live tomorrow.

Founded in 2011, Austin, Tex.-based Mass Relevance has over 200 clients and has worked on many high-profile media properties,  including Marvel’s The Avengers, American Idol, X-Factor, 80 Plates, and The Voice.

Twitter-owned video sharing application Vine has raised its age rating from 12+ to 17+ following controversy surrounding pornographic clips shared widely on the service.

Vine is one of the hottest new video-sharing applications, and its quick rise in just a few weeks led to the ouster of rival app Viddy’s CEO. But Vine has had a problem with users submitting easily searchable clips of porn, which was highlighted when someone at Vine accidentally placed a hardcore porn clip to the top of every user’s feed. Twitter responded to that incident by making Vine porn harder to find.

But it looks like that wasn’t enough to please Twitter (and perhaps Apple, who has blocked certain iOS apps for making risqué images and videos available). Now Vine has been bumped up to a 17+ age rating, likely to make sure parents will know questionable content can be found on the service. When you download or update the app, it now warns that the app contains “age-restricted material” and says you need to be 17 or over to download it.

On top of bumping up the age rating, the latest Vine update adds sharing to Twitter or Facebook after you post to Vine. The update also lets users report or block an abusive profile and fixes bugs.

Check out some recent Vine videos below to get a feel for the uses of the service besides porn:

Time for a little Puppy Bowl action. vine.co/v/b106vu7w5jV

— Sean Ludwig (@seanludwig) February 4, 2013

Get off my pier. vine.co/v/bnB7WUW3XUv

— Buster Heine (@BST3R) February 4, 2013

Top image via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Thumbnail image of sexy couple via lenetstan/Shutterstock

Viddy CEO and cofounder Brett O’Brien has been ousted from his role as head of the company after losing much of its buzz to Twitter-owned Vine and reportedly turning down an insane buyout offer from Twitter.

First reported by PandoDaily, this story is a surprising and sad one. Video-sharing app Viddy attracted $30 million in funding in May because it had 30 million users and was growing quickly. By December, the service was still chugging along but with less momentum, so it finally released an Android app.

But the game for social video changed when Vine launched a few weeks ago. You use that service to share six seconds of video, and you can cleverly piece together these videos to tell stories or do other creative things. (I posted a Vine about the Puppy Bowl during the Super Bowl blackout last weekend.)

But Viddy could’ve potentially been where Vine is if it had accepted an offer from Twitter. PandoDaily reports that it was a “high eight- to low nine-figure acquisition offer.” Battery Ventures general partner and Viddy board member Brian O’Malley told Pando that that offer never happened.

But if the offer did happen, it’s a little crazy to consider that O’Brien turned that down, and a decline of that sort of offer could explain O’Brien’s ouster. Perhaps he thought Viddy was going to be the true “Instagram for video” app that would eventually own the landscape. Arguably, that title may now be Vine’s, but its porn problems could hurt that perception.

Now Viddy is left with “4 to 5 million uniques a month,” which is down from its high of more than 30 million, and facing strong competition from Vine. It will need to do some magic to return to the spotlight.

O’Malley indicated that version 2.0 of Viddy will launch in the next few weeks. Viddy also circulated a statement that it is conducting a search for a CEO.

But will that be enough to turn it around?

Twitter-owned video-sharing app Vine is taking steps to curb access to porn after it attracted a lot of unwanted criticism this morning for placing a hardcore porn video at the top of every user’s feed.

After a few hours with the video up and collecting a great deal of negative feedback, Vine removed the offending clip, and a Twitter spokesperson apologized for the “human error.”

“A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realizing this mistake, we removed the video immediately,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat earlier today. “We apologize to our users for the error.”

But now the service is doing more than just being more careful about its Editors Pick’s. Vine now blocks many searches for tags that might lead to pornographic videos, such as #porn, #boobs, #sex, and #booty. Searching for those terms brings nothing up inside the popular app.

While tags such as #nsfw and #pornvine are still searchable, it at least looks like Vine is beginning to take steps to make sure Apple doesn’t remove Vine from the App Store, like it did with 500px for pornographic images. Apple did, however, remove Vine from its list of Editor’s Picks today.

Vine was launched last week by Twitter and has attracted a lot of fans among the tech-enthusiast crowd. We’ll see if that enthusiasm holds up after this controversy.

Check out how some common Vine searches look now below:

Woman with eyes covered via MarcusVDT/Shutterstock

Updated at 7:38 a.m. Pacific with comment from Twitter.

Users of the popular video-sharing app Vine got a surprise this morning when a short clip of hardcore pornography appeared as an “editor’s pick” and placed at the top of every user’s feed.

Twitter launched Vine last week, and the new video app has attracted a lot of fans among the tech-enthusiast crowd. But since the service easily allows porn clips to be shared and found, some are wondering if Apple will take down the service; Apple has a history of removing apps that give access to adult material. Vine’s video slip-up today certainly won’t help matters.

As you can see in the picture above, a video titled “Dildoplay” with the tags #nsfw, #porn, and #nsfwvine was selected as an editor’s pick. Vine selects editor’s pick videos and places them in users’ activity streams presumably to show off the most creative uses of the service.

The video was up for a few hours, but it has since been removed from users’ feeds. Twitter blamed “human error” for the posting of adult content.

“A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realizing this mistake we removed the video immediately,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “We apologize to our users for the error.”

While the video did not play unless you tapped it, users were not happy about the prominent placement of porn in their feeds today.

Some choice comments from Vine users:

Taylor Winklemeyer: “I clicked on the video bc I thought the warning was a joke. I’m furious I had to see something like this.”

Brendan Wilhide: “First video I see after installing the app. How is this an editor’s pick?”

Curt Voice Allen: “This is garbage man! This should not be the first thing I see when I open this app. UNSUBSCRIBE ME PLEASE!!!”

Alessandro Melandri: “You must be crazy! Editor’s pick?!? Deleting the app now.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A new service called Vinepeek is giving you an in-the-moment look at what people are recording and posting to Twitter’s new video-sharing mobile app Vine.

Twitter released Vine on Thursday, making it possible for anyone to share those short and sweet bits of content in a whole new medium: video. You can upload up to six seconds of video content that will be played in a loop. You can cut up your content to show, for example, a beer being consumed, or a person running to a finish line. The technology was created by a company called Vine, which Twitter acquired before the product was ever launched.

Now, as more people start to use the app, Vinepeek will let you see each video as it is uploaded in real time. It was a “Friday project” created by folks from PXi Ventures, a London tech incubator, according to the website. PXi recommends that you use Vinepeek on a desktop, and cautions that you might see a Vine twice.

As Mashable points out, this is similar to a service called This Is Now, which shows you Instagram photos from all over the world, uploaded while you watch.

Now, go enjoy a little Saturday life-procrastination.

hat tip Mashable; Image created by Meghan Kelly with screenshots from Vine