• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 5, 2013

Consider the battle joined. Weeks after Facebook’s Instagram photo sharing app added short video capture in order to take on Twitter’s quickly spreading Vine video app, Vine answers with what it touts as “our biggest, most exciting update yet.” The micro-vid network announced at its blog and launched in the iOS App Store a version 1.3 that adds numerous features to the point-and-record app.

Vine has added several video-making tools, including a layout grid overlay, selective focus and a ghosting tool intended to add some precision and range to the creation process. Admittedly I spent only five or so minutes with the new creativity features and found them poorly explained and more confusing than helpful. How exactly the focus and ghosting tools work in tandem with the core press and release, start and stop functionality that makes the app a joy to use is not made clear to the user. In fact, Vine had to Tweet out an explanation of "ghosting" later. It provides an overlay of your last stop point to make stop motion animation easier to create. I know I have whined about this one before, but I can’t fathom why apps don’t use their own platform to explain updates more carefully and within the context of use.

Clearer are the new discovery and content segmentation tools in the update. Content now can be found in 15 channels, everything from dogs, cats and comedy to music, sports and post that sport cool special effects. There is also a cluster of hashtags that are trending. An “On the rise” section identifies individual posters who are trending up.

The sharing tools are enhanced in two directions. A “revining” button lets you post a discovered video to your own feed in retweet fashion. And you can now protect a post from being broadcast beyond your followers.

One key thing Vine avoided was the temptation perhaps to expand its 6 second video limit to match Instagram’s 15 seconds. Good move. One of the subtler consequences of the discovery updates in this release is that it highlights the level of creativity people and brands bring to this compressed and challenging format. Whether it is someone scanning reserved parking markers to find a Honey Boo Boo spot or an obese jokester who paints the Ghostbusters’ green Slimer ghost on his massive gelatinous belly and jiggles it to the movie theme (yeah these are real), Vine continues to render a theater of everyman creativity.

The secret sauce here in both creation and consumption is brevity. The six-second format demands innovative narrative solutions. And that same length makes the results eminently consumable in rapid fire fashion. The makers of Vine seem to grasp in this update that they have something more than a social network here. This is, at least until we tire of it, an absorbing user-generated entertainment source. The upside is that it is just more fun than a standard social feed. The potential risk is that its reliance on creativity also makes it less of a social network that attracts as a way to connect with the people we care about.