YouTube founders launch Vine competitor
- Jon Xavier
- Web Producer- Silicon Valley Business Journal
- Email | Twitter | Google+
And, like a lot of hyped technology spaces, it's quickly becoming a crowded field. There's Vine, the Twitter-owned service that limits users to 6.5 seconds of video. There's Instagram, which upped the ante by letting users upload 15 seconds of video. There's even, allegedly, a service called Tout, although I've never actually met anyone who uses it. They might not exist, like unicorns.
So a new competitor wouldn't normally be a big deal, but this one comes with quite a pedigree — it's the brainchild of Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who basically invented modern web video when they founded a little company called YouTube.
The app, MixBit, is the first product to be released by AVOS Systems, a development company Hurley and Chen founded in Redwood City after they sold YouTube to Google for $1.5 billion.
What's interesting about the service, aside from the folks behind it, is that it seems to have a fundamentally different philosophy from the others in the space. Whereas most are all about brevity, MixBit videos can be up to an hour long. Whereas most are about stand-alone clips, MixBit is about mash-ups and collaboration — you can edit clips together and even pull other people's work in to complete your masterpiece. It's also anonymous, something that's refreshing in the age of social media self-promotion, but it might also hurt its virality as it makes it harder to follow users you like.
MixBit feels different, in other words. And in a technology space where services are primarily defining themselves on how long videos can be, different is good.
It's hard to say if MixBit will be successful as YouTube was, but they might be off to a good start.
Jon Xavier is Web Producer at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1826.
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