Hatebase: An anti-genocide app

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 at 12:06 PM - 0 Comments

Timothy Quinn has found a use for hate.

He and his team have built a tool called Hatebase that scours the world’s tweets for hate speech. Hatebase is an effort of The Sentinel Project for Genocide Projection, a Toronto-based NGO. It indexes real-time utterances of all known epithets and their places of origin. If hateful tweets are geo-tagged, Hatebase can pinpoint a surge in racism to its origin, getting as “granular” as a six-block radius.

Hate speech, Quinn says, is one of the main precursors to violence and mass atrocity. By constantly monitoring the world’s social media chatter, Hatebase aims to build an early warning system for ethnic conflict, even genocide. He brings up the Rwandan Genocide, immediately before which the term “inyenzi”, meaning “cockroach”, was widely used on the radio in the ’90s in an effort to dehumanize Tutsis by Hutus. “Inyenzi” reached peak usage right before the mass killings began.

If it happened again today, the word would probably spike on social media too, giving NGOs and the international community an opportunity to intervene and prevent atrocities. “I’ll know it’s a success,” says Quinn, “when we have Amnesty International, Red Cross, Ushahidi and USAid pulling our data.” By offering its data free through an API, other organizations can plug Hatebase in to their own systems. Quinn sees the tool not as a sole predictor of conflict, but as a powerful data point that can be layered in with other information to paint a detailed picture of trouble brewing around the world. Continue…

Justin Trudeau and Jose Canseco discuss the Montreal Canadiens

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 at 11:23 PM - 0 Comments

When the Ottawa Senators scored late in tonight’s game with the Montreal Canadiens to tie the score, Justin Trudeau was displeased.

Merde! #GoHabsGo

This was retweeted by National Post columnist Bruce Arthur, who is followed by former baseball star Jose Canseco, who then directed a tweet at Mr. Trudeau.

hey buddy @JustinTrudeau habs or leafs?

Mr. Trudeau responded.

.@JoseCanseco Sorry bud, as long as the #Habs are still in, they’re my team. Then it’s whatever Canadian team is left.

Mr. Canseco then attempted to continue the conversation.

@JustinTrudeau blue and white for me buddy #leafs .what should we do about rod ford @tomayorford?

As of this writing, Mr. Trudeau has not commented on what they should do about “Rod Ford.” But Mr. Canseco does now credit Mr. Trudeau with his knowledge of French swear words. Also, Mr. Canseco seems to think that, given the electoral significance of Ontario, Mr. Trudeau might consider supporting the Leafs.

See previously: Stephen Harper vs. Homer Simpson

Onion Twitter account may have been hacked, Syrian Electronic Army claims responsibility

By Emily Senger - Monday, May 6, 2013 at 5:50 PM - 0 Comments

The Onion‘s Twitter account has been hacked by a group claiming to be the Syrian Electronic Army. Either that, or the satirical news site has delivered a strange and disorienting joke that has fooled at least a few major websites, and many Twitter users.

Strange tweets started appearing from The Onion website’s Twitter account Monday afternoon, some containing anti-Israel statements. Those tweets were removed from the Twitter feed an hour later, but here’s a screen grab of some of them:
Continue…

U.S. regulators look for ways to deal with social media after Twitter hack roiled markets

By The Associated Press - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 at 8:16 PM - 0 Comments

WASHINGTON – A week after hackers broke into The Associated Press’ Twitter feed and roiled financial markets, federal regulators say they need to find ways to deal with the impact of social media.

Members of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission didn’t outline immediate action Tuesday. CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton suggested they consider imposing tougher cybersecurity rules for investment firms and others that trade. Firms could be held accountable and sanctioned if their security systems were inadequate to prevent a breech.

At a meeting of an advisory panel, Commissioner Scott O’Malia said regulators need to begin figuring out how to respond to social media.

The false tweet reporting explosions at the White House sent the stock market on a brief plunge. The CFTC, the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating.

Why is Twitter opening up a Canadian office, anyhow?

By Jesse Brown - Monday, April 29, 2013 at 2:58 PM - 0 Comments

The tweet sounded like a joke. Kirstine Stewart, vice president of CBC English language services (translation: the woman who runs the CBC) has left the public broadcaster to head up Twitter Canada. Why did it seem like a prank?

Because there is no Twitter Canada.

But there will be. Twitter Canada‘s offices will be opening in Toronto. They are hiring, and Kirstine Stewart will be at the helm. Twitter has verified this, as has Stewart herself.

So what does it mean?

For the CBC

It’s hard to see an upside to this for the Ceeb. Stewart was in the middle of steering a major “renewal” effort, an attempt to find steady footing following massive budget cuts and layoffs. News was “modernized”, radio razed, and a major emphasis on primetime TV ratings began to bear fruit. Online has languished, as it awaited new management, with the exception of one major project, the free streaming CBC Music service. Like these changes or hate them, most CBC employees accepted them, and welcomed Stewart as their face. She washed away much of the bad taste left by her predecessor, the detested Richard Stursberg. For those weathering the storm within the CBC, trusting in Stewart’s relentless positivity (is there a more exuberant executive on Twitter?) and believing that they would all pull through the bad times together, her departure can’t be good news. I know a number of young(ish) CBC employees who’ve been debating whether or not to keep building careers at the Ceeb, questioning what place it will have in tomorrow’s digital media environment.  Morale must suck for them today.

For Twitter

Why is Twitter opening a Canada outpost anyway, and why do they want Stewart to lead it? Stewart’s first (mini) interview today was with U.S. site TechCrunch, which hurt my feelings, but which provided a hint about what Twitter will be up to here. Stewart spoke to TechCrunch in riddles, describing herself as a “longtime champion of great content,” an area where Twitter is doing “incredibly exciting” things. She also commented on Twitter’s newest ally, the massive ad firm StarCom MediaVest, which Stewart said is “really setting itself up as quite the partner”.

Reading the tea leaves here, this talk is all about Twitter’s second-screen dreams. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo recently remarked that Twitter’s future is intertwined with television, as a “complementary” media platform. Be it Oscars, Olympics, or news, Twitter sees huge traffic spikes when big TV events occur and viewers want to chatter about them. This audience is ripe for targeted advertising, and Twitter wants to work with big brands on hybrid campaigns. TV ad spots are bought at the national, not international level. If Twitter wants to piggyback Canadian TV advertising deals, it’ll need a Canadian office. So far, they’re hiring ad sales people here, not developers. Twitter Canada will likely have little to do with technology, a field Stewart has no experience in. She is a career television executive, and Twitter must be hopeful that she can cut them a clear path through Canada’s insular and change-resistant TV and advertising industries.

For Kirstine Stewart

What would you rather do, make TV shows or sell Twitter ads? Leaving the CBC for Twitter sounds sexy, but for an executive known for getting deeply involved in the creative side of television production, Twitter may prove a bore. True, it’s a far more dynamic setting than the CBC, but Stewart will be subservient to big decisions made in San Francisco, and she’ll have to compel Canadian brands to take chances and invest online, when they’re notorious for waiting to see how things go down in the U.S. first. It’s a lot less power than she’s used to.

For Canada

There’s nothing bad about this for the rest of us, but there’s not much to get excited about either. Best case scenario: Twitter makes like Google and opens up a Canadian policy shop to deal with privacy, regulation, and free expression issues. Twitter has generally protected its users’ rights admirably in the U.S., and Canadians could use some of that here.

Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBrown

CBC executive Kirstine Stewart leaves for job as head of Twitter Canada

By Manisha Krishnan - Monday, April 29, 2013 at 1:04 PM - 0 Comments

A high-ranking CBC executive is leaving the public broadcaster to run Twitter Canada.

Kirstine Stewart, who today changed her Twitter handle from @KStewartCBC to @kirstinestewart, has taken up a job as head of Twitter Canada after two years as executive vice president of CBC’s English Services.

So happy to have @kirstinestewart as our new Managing Director of Canada!

— Twitter Canada (@TwitterCanada) April 29, 2013

“I’ve had some of the happiest moments in my life at the CBC, and I’ve been honoured to represent such an important name to Canadians,” said Stewart in a media release.

Hubert T. Lacroix, president and CEO of CBC/Radio Canada, said Stewart has played a valuable role in establishing CBC as a “modern public broadcaster.”

The corporation is currently on the hunt for her replacement.

Inexperienced son of a former prime minister makes good

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 26, 2013 at 11:12 AM - 0 Comments

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney tweets about William Pitt the Younger.

Delivered the inaugural speech to the Albany Club’s William Pitt Society. Spoke on Pitt, Burke & the conservative conception of Parliament.

In preparation for tonight’s speech, I finally got around to reading @WilliamJHague‘s masterful 2004 biography, “William Pitt the Younger.”

1/ Prime Minister at age 24, Pitt governed for 19 years, effectively founded the Conservative Party; modernized Britain’s public finances;

2/ massively strengthened Royal Navy, leading to victory at Trafalgar; was ahead of his time on abolition of slavery & Parliamentary reform;

3/ led the fight against French Jacobinism; and was a man of unimpeachable integrity. A remarkable leader in every respect.

Here is the Wikipedia guide to William Pitt. And here is the Guardian’s review of Mr. Hague’s biography.

Jokes with characters, Comedy Central to launch comedy festival on Twitter

By The Associated Press - Sunday, April 21, 2013 at 10:51 PM - 0 Comments

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Putting a new test to the adage that brevity is the soul of wit, Comedy Central is partnering with Twitter for a comedy festival played out in 140 characters and 6-second videos.

The Viacom Inc.-owned network said Sunday that the festival with the hashtag “ComedyFest” will debut April 29. Over five days, comedians will tweet jokes and post videos with the recently launched video app Vine, which limits footage to 6 seconds.

The launch of the festival, which Comedy Central is expected to officially announce Monday, was first reported by The New York Times.

Kicking off the social media festival will be an event Monday at the Paley Center in Los Angeles featuring Rob Reiner, Judd Apatow and Mel Brooks. So far, Brooks is a Twitter holdout.

Rehtaeh Parsons: a self-portrait

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 3:31 PM - 0 Comments

No one dies anymore without leaving a little of themselves behind—in this case, on Twitter. The picture Rehtaeh left of herself in the last few months of her life (which includes a snapshot of a report card) may not be the one her parents or her self-appointed postmortem defenders would make, and who knows how faithful it might be to the broad sweep of her life. Probably not very. But it is a picture she assembled for the consumption of others, piece by piece; and her desperate deflection of darkening spirits by means of gangsta bravado, humour, and idealism is heartbreaking. I will leave it to the reader to treat this as forensic data and imagine possible implications for some revenge project or other. Such a thing might or might not be warranted; she hasn’t left us any clues here.

Stephen Colbert forces Bill Clinton to join Twitter as @PrezBillyJeff

By Emily Senger - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 9:23 AM - 0 Comments

Jeff Roberson/AP

Long-time Twitter holdout former president Bill Clinton is now on Twitter thanks to a little help — some would say coercion — from Stephen Colbert.

Clinton appeared on The Colbert Report Monday, which was filmed at a Clinton Global Initiative University meeting in St. Louis.

The two discussed social media and reaching out to youth before Colbert announced his surprise for the former president.

“Well, sir, I took the liberty of opening you a Twitter account,” Colbert said.

Clinton is a little late to the game, so the handles @PresidentClinton and @WilliamJeffersonClinton were already taken, but @PrezBillyJeff was wide open and available. A Twitter account was born, with the description: “I am President William Jefferson Billy Jeff Rodham Clinton. Stephen Colbert is my BFF.”

So far, Clinton has racked up nearly 35,000 followers by sending out only one tweet. He even got the hashtag for the Clinton Global Initiative University correct.

Just spent amazing time with Colbert!Is he sane? He is cool! #cgiu

— Billy Jeff Clinton (@PrezBillyJeff) April 6, 2013

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tells ’60 Minutes’ he wants to run for mayor of NYC someday

By The Associated Press - Monday, March 18, 2013 at 8:01 AM - 0 Comments

Ben Nelms

NEW YORK, N.Y. – There may be another billionaire interested in New York City’s top job.

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of the popular social media service Twitter and the mobile payments startup Square, reportedly says he wants to be mayor of New York one day.

In an interview aired Sunday on “60 Minutes,” CBS’ Lara Logan said Dorsey is serious about moving to the Big Apple someday and running for mayor.

Continue…

Twitter app for Windows gets update, now in line with iOS and Android

By Emily Senger - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 at 1:47 PM - 0 Comments

Twitter users who operate on a Windows-based smartphone now get the same experience as users on iOS and Android platforms.

In a blog post Tuesday, the social media service announced an update to its Windows app that “brings the app in line with other Twitter apps.”

Notably, the updated app offers four tabs to allow users to navigate: Home, Connect, Discover and Me — something that iOS and Android users already have.

It also features new tweet and search icons and live tiles, which allow users to put Twitter links on their start screens. Continue…

Twitter prepares to rate the value of your tweets

By Emily Senger - Monday, February 18, 2013 at 10:39 AM - 0 Comments

Prepare to be judged by Twitter. Starting Wednesday, Feb. 20, Twitter has announced that it will begin assigning values to each and every tweet using: none, low and medium. Eventually, “high” will be rolled out as well.

The idea is that the new data, which will be publicly available, will allow developers to better sort through the millions of tweets to find the data that is useful to them. In the words of Twitter developer Arne Roomann-Kurrik: “This will allow applications to more easily surface certain types of content from otherwise noisy or high-volume feeds.”

The exact way that the tweets will be valued is a bit unclear, but it’s likely that it will work in the way that top tweets appear now during a Twitter search. For instance, tweets that are being retweeted by many people, or tweets from people with a lot of followers, will likely be assigned a higher value ranking. Likewise, that tweet about your lunchtime tuna sandwich to your 201 followers might get a “none” or “low” ranking.

Sam Laird at Mashable writes that the new development seems like it will be good for users: “It’s definitely a positive for Twitter, which will have the power to designate “high” value tweets (in some cases, perhaps, for a price) and possibly experiment with new ways of displaying tweets.”

The downside, according to Laird: “On the other hand, judging the value of tweets is a significant and unprecedented step for the company. Some could find it a bit invasive and, well, judgmental.”

Another downside: The new rating system could make it difficult for users with smaller followings to be featured, even when they have something good to say.

Rodger Cuzner is unimpressed with Tony Clement

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 4:53 PM - 0 Comments

Liberal MP Sean Casey, NDP MP Peter Stoffer, Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Treasury Board president Tony Clement were involved in a spiriting series of exchanges this afternoon over the treatment of disabled military and RCMP veterans.

Liberal MP Rodger Cuzner was apparently unimpressed with Mr. Clement’s final response.

Tony Clement just offered the stupidest,most useless,irrelevant,unrelated,embarrassing ,condescending,flippant non answer I’ve heard in 12ys

Noted on Twitter: #CandyHeartRejects

By Aaron Hutchins - Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 5:20 AM - 0 Comments

Valentine’s Day #CandyHeartRejects

Storified by Maclean’s Magazine· Thu, Feb 14 2013 02:16:03

Justin Bieber fans insult Black Keys drummer, Patrick Carney fights back

By Emily Senger - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 at 9:56 AM - 0 Comments

Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney vs. Justin Bieber

Don’t knock The Biebs. That’s what Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney learned after suggesting that maybe Justin Bieber didn’t need another Grammy.

Storified by Maclean’s Magazine· Wed, Feb 13 2013 06:55:34

Newsmakers

By Emily Senger, Jaime Weinman, Jonathon Gatehouse, and Mika Rekai - Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 7:00 PM - 0 Comments

Pete Souza/White House

Shorn for love

America isn’t the only place where young pop stars have to apologize for having a sex life. Minami Minegishi, a 20-year-old member of the Japanese musical group AKB48, shaved her head in penance after a gossip magazine showed her leaving the apartment of a backup dancer from another band. It wasn’t the romance with a rival group that caused the scandal, but the fact that, as Minegishi said in an apologetic YouTube video, she did not “behave as a good role model” and follow the band’s rules about sexual behaviour—namely, it’s off-limits to girls. The tearful apology didn’t help her cause—management demoted the star to a trainee team.

Skeet truthers

When U.S. President Barack Obama told the New Republic that “up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time,” he probably never dreamed he’d set off a full-fledged new conspiracy theory, now dubbed “Skeetgate.” Many conservatives accused Obama of lying about his gun fandom; one Republican representative demanded to know “if he is a skeet shooter, why have we not heard of it?” The outcry grew so great that the White House released a photo of Obama shooting skeet at Camp David, which simply resulted in accusations that it was photoshopped, plus mockery of the “mom jeans” he was wearing in the picture. Continue…

Noted on Twitter: Dogs in front of TVs watching Westminster Kennel Club show

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 5:05 PM - 0 Comments

Noted on Twitter: People tweeting photos of dogs watching the Westminster dog show

It’s the 137th edition of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. While some 2,700 dogs are in New York for the competition, others are catching the event on the tube:

Storified by Maclean’s Magazine· Tue, Feb 12 2013 14:01:02

City of Vaughan has social media meltdown with expletive in snow-day tweet

By Emily Senger - Friday, February 8, 2013 at 10:26 AM - 0 Comments

The City of Vaughan caused a stir Friday morning after going way, way off message in its social media account during a snowstorm in the city north of Toronto.

Ouch @city_of_vaughan. I guess they haven’t noticed yet because it’s still up an hour later. twitter.com/_melissaashley…

— Melissa Perri (@_melissaashley) February 8, 2013

The offensive tweet was soon deleted, but not before many people retweeted the original tweet, took screengrabs of it, or expressed their (mock) outrage. Continue…

Privacy: Be afraid, be very afraid. But don’t be afraid of Twitter.

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 4:07 PM - 0 Comments

Few topics are covered so poorly as online privacy, few are handled with such indifference toward reader interest or facts. Take, for example, last week’s big scary Twitter hack. Twitter realized a significant number of accounts were compromised by a new attack. So it reset passwords. No one has reported any identity theft, fraud, or damage.  Twitter issued a blog post to make sure those affected would get online and change their passwords.  Somehow, this snowballed into a major privacy story.

While I was delivering some talking-head sound-bites on this item for a certain newscast, the reporter asked me why the Twitter hack was such a huge deal. I was stumped–it wasn’t. So she asked me why it was getting so much attention. I knew the answer, but held my tongue.

Here’s what I was thinking: it gets so much attention because print and TV news love to bash technology, especially social media, and can’t resist a scary story about how the people who use it should be very, very afraid. The truth is, despite years of fear-mongering stories about Facebook identity theft, Gmail phishing attacks and massive Twitter hacks, public interest and concern about these things remains very low. That’s because these things haven’t happened to the vast majority of us, or to anyone we know. For the small number of people this has happened to, the impact is typically minimal. The mainstream news has become the Boy who Cried Internet.

This is not to say privacy isn’t a valid concern when it comes to free Internet services. There’s much to worry about, but little of it has to do with Russian digital mobsters, Chinese military hackers or spammy Nigerian princes. The real data privacy danger–with social media, and beyond–comes from government.

Consider this: federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart’s office received just 18 complaints from the public about (alleged) Internet privacy violations in 2011. In 2010, the number was 19. In Stoddart’s 2011 ranking of privacy-challenged industries, the Internet came in at seventh place, way behind the financial industry, transportation, and telecommunications, which took the top three spots, in that order. Even the hotel industry was worse than the Internet, earning 24 complaints, though you won’t hear much about the privacy dangers of Holiday Inn on the news. But here’s the truly shocking thing: add up all of the public’s privacy gripes with private companies in 2011, and you get 281 formal complaints to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

Now look at the most recent OPC annual report on alleged government intrusions into our privacy: the number is 986. And that’s an almost 40 per cent jump over the previous year’s number of government-related complaints. As I’ll detail in the next post, these complaints aren’t trivial: the breaches are serious, with real implications, and they stem from a culture of privacy sloppiness (at best).  So yes, you should be scared about your privacy. But it’s not Twitter you should be scared of.

It’s Ottawa.

Over the next few posts I’ll be telling you what, if anything, is being done about it. Then we’ll look ahead at the real privacy threats Canadians should be thinking about.  (Hint: C-30, the defeated Internet Snooping bill just rumbled from its coffin and stuck a zombie finger through the dirt.)

Next: Civil servants with your data in their pants: Why it’s still OK to bring a USB key home in Ottawa.

Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBrown

France attempts to ban the word ‘hashtag,’ replace it with ‘mot-dièse’

By Emily Senger - Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 10:06 AM - 0 Comments

The French language police are carrying out their mission of cracking down on English words encroaching on the French language by officially banning the Twitter term “hashtag.”

The Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologisme has decreed that hashtag shall henceforth be known as “mot-dièse,” which is from Gallic and translates to English as “sharp-word,” reports Time.

News of the word swap was posted on the government website Journal Officiel Wednesday, reports The Local. Mot-dièse will, from now on, be used in all official French documents. Continue…

Arcade Fire recording studio on the market

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 1:35 PM - 0 Comments

Danaï Papadomanolakis

For sale: one crumbling piece of Canadian music history. Montreal indie rockers Arcade Fire have put their recording studio, a converted 160-year-old church in Farnham, Que., up on the block. The listing, posted via the band’s Twitter account last week, asks $325,000 for the red brick structure located on a quiet village side street, “walking distance to main road, shops and schools.” The group has sunk considerable money into the building since acquiring it in 2005, upgrading plumbing and wiring, renovating bedrooms and a kitchen, and adding a full recording studio in the basement. And the cozy set-up is where they laid down the bulk of their acclaimed 2007 offering Neon Bible and its hit 2010 follow-up, The Suburbs, winner of a Grammy as best album of the year.

But potential buyers should beware. The listing notes a couple of problems: minor water infiltration after heavy rain, and a roof that needs to be replaced at an estimated cost of between $23,000 and $44,000.

According to reports in the music press last fall, structural issues with the church became so bad that the group was forced to stop working on its next disc—due later this year—and find new recording space. “The roof is collapsing. It’s completely falling apart,” Jeremy Gara, the band’s drummer, told an Ottawa radio station.

For all its critical success—appearances on Saturday Night Live, opening for U2 and jamming on stage with Bruce Springsteen—it seems the seven-member band remains something less than rock-star rich. So faced with a repair bill that outstrips the $30,000 they received as winners of the 2011 Polaris Prize for best Canadian album, they’re moving on. Maybe Rush or Carly Rae Jepsen are in the market.

Question Period at 140 characters

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 1:16 PM - 0 Comments

The Liberals decided to stage their own Question Period on Twitter this morning, tweeting questions at government ministers (who, so far, have failed to respond). You can follow the proceedings through the Liberal party’s Twitter account or my list of MPs on Twitter. Though the exercise probably served the Liberal side’s purpose—bringing attention to their concerns about government policy—it turns out that 140 characters doesn’t leave a lot of space for subtlety. Bob Rae’s two questions on government spending and the Parliamentary Budget Officer—here and here—were probably the sharpest.

Vine lets you tweet six-second videos, just like you never wanted

By Jesse Brown - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 10:41 AM - 0 Comments

What to make of Vine? Twitter rolled out the “micro-video” app yesterday, and like Twitter, it’s more than it seems. 

Vine lets you shoot and share videos with your phone. Big deal, right? But six years ago, I heard about Twitter, an app that lets you share sentences. I said “big deal” then too. I could already do that, just as I could already make and share videos.

Twitter turned out to be a big deal indeed. Its genius was its simplicity. Sure, I could already write sentences–lots of them–on my blog and share them with the world, but by constraining me to 140 characters and feeding my tweets into an opt-in stream with pushbutton network effect (the brilliant “retweet”), Twitter removed all barriers to real-time chatter with an unlimited audience. The result, we now see, was a pretty significant transformation in communication.

Vine applies the same factors to video. It constrains you to six seconds, max. It removes all trickier aspects of video production–even basic editing tools are absent. It processes all videos into files similar to animated gifs–those lightweight, looping meme-able moments that proliferate wildly. Vine is integrated with Twitter (naturally), so you can attach one to a tweet as easily as you would a photo.

Early hype has it that Vine will be huge. I’ve learned my lesson and won’t predict otherwise, but I do have some reservations:

• The written word is incredibly efficient. You can say a lot in 140 characters. But video? Less may be more here. Moving pictures often convey less info than still photos. What can you say with a six-second clip that you couldn’t say with a TwitPic? I guess we’ll find out.

• Streamlining video is a step in the right direction when it comes to the instantaneous culture of social media. But even constrained to six seconds of compressed loopage, a vine is much more data-heavy than a tweet. It apparently takes a full 30 minutes for Vine to process and post each clip. On the receiving end, the burden of loading a constant stream of twitching videos is already crashing and clogging twitter clients. (Incidentally, I’m not embedding any vines in this post, since this page filled with them keeps crashing my browser.)

• What the heck will we use it for? Twitter succeeds (for Twitter, at least) when it becomes second nature–when you barely think before you tweet. But people seem to be having lots of trouble thinking of anything substantive to share through Vine. Day one has brought us a barrage of pet videos and cinematic panoramas of people’s desks.

I look forward to eating these words in the days ahead, as users the world over stretch the limits of the micro-vid.

Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBrown