This weekend, Vine debuted a channel dedicated entirely to Coachella, but did so in a very different way. Instead of opening it up to the masses of content about Coachella, they focused on a narrative created by two highly popular Vine users, Devon and Cody.
With this playlist, which isn’t the first temporary “channel” the company has created but is the first dedicated to specific individual users, Vine is venturing further into the world of a longer narrative.
“People continue to turn to Vine every day to be entertained — through moments, stories and ideas,” said a Vine spokesperson. “We want to provide experiences that make this easier, and we’re constantly exploring new ways to do that. Experiments like this channel are one example, helping tell stories on an even bigger scale.”
As it stands now, most Vines are their own complete stories. They aren’t threaded together with other Vines or curated together into various playlists. They stand on their own.
But users are finding their own ways of broadening the narrative of a single Vine, whether it be through introducing their own general theme to their profile, re-Vining a collection of similar Vines from other users into their own feeds, or even posting their stories in reverse-chronological order so that it works properly with the Vine feed, which shows most recent posts first.
Vine has also toyed with the idea of a Playlist before, in the form of temporary channels aggregating content from events like New Year’s Eve and the Super Bowl. Just like permanent channels, temporary channels separated all the content related to those events into Popular and Recent categories. Devon and Cody’s Coachella Playlist is very different, taking a highly curated approach to letting users experience an event from two experienced, popular Vine users.
Snapchat, a social network that tangentially competes with Vine, has long offered a feature called Stories, which gives users the opportunity to thread together various snaps into a kind of living, ephemeral timeline. While users have generally used them to show tidbits from their days (Story content lasts for 24 hours), brands and artists have taken to Snapchat Stories in more creative ways, building out longer-form content.
That has then translated into Snapchat’s new Discover feature, which essentially uses a series of Snaps, complete with video, imagery and text, to tell a larger story from the viewpoint of a publisher, such as USA Today or Cosmopolitan.
Vine obviously hasn’t taken the idea beyond a few past events and Devon and Cody’s great Coachella adventure, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see the network soon offer tools for collecting or curating Vines together to tell a larger story. While restraint is part of what makes the Vine experience so compelling, it’s also difficult to fit an entire story into six seconds.
You can watch Cody and Devon at Coachella in TV mode (one automatically after the other) right here.