Thanks to technology, most of us now have the ability to shoot and edit long, high-quality videos on our phones, to upload them and to share them socially with everyone we know. But somehow, the hot social media trend is supershort video clips that are much closer to the GIF than to "Citizen Kane." In the past few years, a number of companies have launched around mobile video-sharing -- among them Viddy, Socialcam and Twitter's own looping, six-second Vine -- all vying for the unofficial title, "the Instagram of video." These apps have bred a unique category of content, from real-life moments such as blowing out birthday candles to short-form artistic creations that play with the medium.
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Micro-video apps like Vine have become hugely popular
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The video snippets people upload are creative, raw and frequently bizarre
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Instagram could be the next service to add short videos
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User: A short video "forces the user to capture the defining elements of a story or concept"
So, a social-video turf war may be looming: @placeholder vs. Vine.