Vine vs Gifboom

Which is better, Vine or Gifboom? If you've never heard of them then these are social networking apps for your smartphone that enable you to create short videos and share them with others. In some ways they are very similar, but in others they are very different.

Twitter has had huge success with its social networking service and who would have thought that restricting online posts to 140 characters would turn out to be so popular. It is a completely arbitrary limit of course and there is absolutely no reason for it. Yet it works. Twitter is trying to emulate its success with Vine, which enables you to post videos online and share them with friends and followers. Like Twitter, there is an arbitrary limit of six seconds on the length of the video clip. The idea is to encourage creativity and keep posts to the minimum and focused on the subject. If you want to post long videos there is YouTube, Vimeo and others. At vine you've got just six seconds to tell your story.

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Gifboom looks very similar at first sight, but it is very different. It creates animated gif files. Instead of recording a video clip, you take a series of photos (or load previously taken ones) and these are combined to create an animated gif. Each image is displayed for a fraction of a second, so it looks like a jerky video clip with a frame rate of about five frames per second.

In a similar way to Vine, Gifboom spurs creativity by limiting gifs to 30 frames (six seconds at 5fps), but there isn't any audio with a gif. I find that this makes a difference in two ways. Firstly, Vine's audio can be undesirable because everyone around you can hear it. You wouldn't want to use Vine in a public place like a coffee shop, train or bus unless you use earphones. Some Vine videos can be boring because there is the temptation of video creators to simply talk to the camera. Talking heads can be dull.

Gifboom forces people to focus on creating something that is visually interesting. You can't have talking heads in animated gifs. It is even more minimalistic than Vine. Gifboom also has more features and you can choose manual or automatic shooting modes for taking the frames that make up the animated gif. You can apply special effects to the images and choose the frame rate.

I like Vine, but I think Gifboom has the edge. It is also available on both iOS and Android, whereas Vine is currently only available on iOS. No doubt there will be an Android version sooner or later though. Both are free.