As soon as the Vine app was launched, I started thinking how I could use it in combination with Twitter; I was looking for something useful and new, an idea to create interesting vines, and I finally decided to do show what I love the most: tech news with the tag #vinews. Nobody had done it yet!
When a vine is published, a channel or topic can be chosen, and it turns out the News & Politics channel is somewhat less crowded than other popular channels, so my vines easily reach more people.
The downside is spam: my last vine received 1 like and 18 comments, all of them spam. And this is the biggest issue of the Vine app for Windows Phone 8… it’s not official.
Do not get me wrong, the app (6Sec) works pretty well, and it’s awesome that independent developers are filling the app-holes that young operating systems have. But we cannot forget that third-party apps have risks: they are updated less frequently and often lack some of the features. What feature is missing in 6Sec? A way of reporting spammers and deleting spam comments.
There are also risks for developers: Vine could change its policies and block 6Sec in a matter of seconds; what would happen to all those people who have paid to upload their vines to the social network? what about those who have paid to avoid ads? They would probably would request a refund. And what would happen to the developer that has already invested all the money on servers and work?
Everyone loses when a company decides to block an unofficial third-party app, but the one receiving the worst hit is the platform (Windows Phone in this case), because of the bad PR that shows to future users and the frustrations produced to the current ones.
Image via Vine
Geek on record 