VinePeek And VineRoulette Let Us Become Real-time Video Voyeurs

Twitter’s new video-sharing service, Vine, launched a few days ago, which we’ve covered extensively. My main complaint after a couple days worth of use is that I simply can’t find enough vines to enjoy. But a “Friday project” out of product incubator PXi Ventures could change all that, as they’ve launched a service called VinePeek.

VinePeek is a website that pulls in the latest vines one after the other. It doesn’t matter who you follow, who you know, or if you’re even on Vine or Twitter.

A similar site, VineRoulette serves up random vines around the world and lets you view tagged vines in a fairly unique interface.

Both services offer real-time streams of all the latest vines from all over the world, and as you’ll learn once you click the link, video certainly brings a whole new level of awesome to the notion of social video.

“We thought it would be cool if you could see the latest vines from around the world in real time, so as a ‘Friday project’ we put together a quick web application to string vines together in a continuous reel,” explained Peter MacRobert, co-creator of VinePeek. “We were immediately struck by the mesmerising and addictive effect of watching several seemingly-disconnected vines in quick succession: a ‘peek’ into people’s lives all over the world.”

The app uses Ruby, Redis and the Twitter API to find new tweets containing vines. These are shown to viewers using HTML5 video. Since launching a couple days ago, the site has seen over 2 million views. The web app is “best viewed in a browser,” but it seemed to do just fine on my iPhone 5, especially with a 4G LTE connection.

As it stands now, no Vine post is private. Twitter plans to add more layers of control to where you post and who can see what, but for now everything’s public property.

However, your personal stream on Vine is only comprised of the Vine users you follow. Similarly, vines will only appear to you on Twitter if they’re posted by someone you follow, or RTed by someone you follow. VinePeek and VineRoulette throw the whole idea of “following” out the window and simply present the latest vines in real-time, to the possible chagrin of folks who might be sharing private or semi-private moments with the service.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some random videos of dogs snuggling on overstuffed couches to watch.