Understand Instant Video Clip Sharing on Mobile Platforms: Twitter’s Vine as a Case Study Lei Zhang Feng Wang Jiangchuan Liu School of Computing Science Department of Computer and School of Computing Science Simon Fraser University Information Science Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC, Canada The University of Mississippi Burnaby, BC, Canada [email protected] University, MS, USA [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION With the rapidly development of mobile networking and In the past decade, the user-generated content available end-terminals, anytime and anywhere data access become on the Internet (e.g., images, videos, micro-blogs, etc.) has readily available nowadays. Given the crowdsourced content presented an explosive growth trend, which provides signifi- capturing and sharing, the preferred length becomes shorter cant opportunities for both understanding how users utilize and shorter, even for such multimedia content as video. A the Internet and enhancing their experiences. Specifically, representative is Twitter's Vine service, which, available ex- for the online video sharing service, we have seen a three- clusively to mobile users, enables them to create ultra-short stage evolution, and the shared videos have shown different video clips, and instantly post and share them with their fol- characteristics in the time dimension through these three lowers. In this paper, we present an initial study on this new stages. At the earliest stage, users upload and view videos generation of instant video clip sharing service over mobile directly on video sharing sites (VSSes) such as YouTube, and platforms, taking Vine as a case. We closely investigate the they can select the related videos recommended by VSSes architecture of Vine, and reveal how its service is empowered [9] or search the interested videos via search engines. Usu- with a combination of advanced mobile and cloud comput- ally, users browse VSSes and view videos in tens of minutes ing platforms. Through a dataset of over 50; 000 video clips at this stage. The emergence of online social networks (OS- and over 1; 000; 000 user profiles, which is available online Ns) (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) however has for academic use, we examine the unique viewing behaviors greatly changed such access patterns through proactively of Vine uses, particularly batch viewing and passive view- and efficiently sharing among friends the video links from ing. We further analyze the video lifetime and propagation external VSSes [7]. The common interests of social groups patterns in this new service, as well as the distinct social direct users to the videos that can last for minutes. Re- relations therein. Our study lead to critical observations cently, the new generation of social applications has been that would help with improving the energy-efficiency and focused on media content sharing among mobile users such scalability of Vine-like services. as photo sharing (Flickr) or short video sharing (Vine) or both (Instagram). The video clips consumed by these social applications are often as short as several seconds, and thus Categories and Subject Descriptors the file size of each clip is relatively small, which allows users H.5.1 [Multimedia Information Systems]: Video; C.4 to view multiple video clips within a very limited time from [Performance of Systems]: Measurement techniques mobile devices. To reveal the characteristics of video sharing services or General Terms social networking applications that allow video sharing, nu- merous measurement studies [1, 2, 3, 6] have been done. Yet Measurement very few have focused on instant video clips sharing over mo- bile platforms. To this end, we attempt to present an initial Keywords study on this new generation of instant video clip sharing service over mobile platforms, taking Vine as a case. In this Mobile, Video Sharing, Social Network paper, we closely examine the unique features of the Vine- like services. We first investigate the architecture of this Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for per- mobile system in detail, which is empowered with a combi- sonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear nation of advanced mobile and cloud computing platforms. this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components Based on our observations, we reveal the unique viewing be- of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstract- haviors of Vine users, particularly batch view and passive ing with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on view. Further, we implement customized crawlers to collect servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a the repost traces of video clips and user profiles. Through fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. the analysis of collected data, we identify the key differences NOSSDAV’14, March 19-21, 2014, Singapore, Singapore. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to between Vine-like services and traditional video sharing ser- ACM. vices, including highly skewed popularity, fast propagation, ACM 978-1-4503-2706-0/14/03 $15.00. short lifetime, dense social network. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2578260.2578278. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the architecture of Vine and the underlying cloud computing services are closely examined. We next present our measure- ment results and analysis in Section 3. A further discussion is provided in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper. 2. A CLOSER LOOK AT VINE As a case study, this paper analyzes the characteristics of Vine, a representative of the new generation of instant video clip sharing services on mobile platforms. Vine is a mobile social networking application that enables its users to create ultra-short video clips, as well as post and share them with their followers. The service was introduced with a maximum Figure 1: Vine's service framework clip length of six seconds and can be shared or embedded on social networking services such as Twitter (which acquired the application in October 2012) and Facebook. Unlike tra- ditional social networking services, Vine exclusively focuses sides capturing the traffic between the test device and the on mobile users, and does not have its counterpart on PCs. Vine server, we also intercepted the SSL connections be- As claimed by Vine's official site, Vine has attracted over tween them to view the detailed requests from the appli- 40 million registered users since its initial release in January cation by using the mitmproxy tool. The traces show that 2013 on iOS platforms. Though Vine was initially available Vine builds its system based on a cluster of cloud comput- only for iOS devices, it also has been appeared on other ma- ing services including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon jor platforms: Vine for Android was released on June 3, 2013 CloudFront, and CDNs provided by Akamai and Fastly. We for devices with Android OS version 4.0 or higher; the Win- accordingly illustrate the Vine's service framework in Fig- dows Phone 8 and Windows 8 version of the Vine app was ure 1. The vine client on the mobile terminal initiates and also unveiled during the Microsoft 2013 Build Conference. maintains a HTTPS connection with the application serv- A typical mobile Vine client has four pages: Home/Feed, er running on the EC2 instances with the domain name Explore, Activity, Profile. In the \Home/Feed" page, users \api.vineapp.com". After the authorization process, users can view, like, comment, and share (repost) the recent posts can then make requests to the Vine server, and the serv- from others that they follow. The functionality of this page er in turn provides proper responses, which allow users to is very similar to the traditional social networking services complete actions such as browsing, search, post, comment, such as Twitter. The only, but the significant difference is like and so on. When a user logs into Vine (or returns to that, instead of texts, the media that people are viewing the \Home/Feed" page), the client makes a GET request for and sharing is ultra short video clip. Vine allows users to the timeline information which corresponds to the recent up- search the videos and the people they are interested in, and dates for this user. After receiving the response, the client also provides the popular/trending posts in Vine, as well can further make GET requests to CDNs with the domain as many dedicated channels focused on the specific topic- name \v.cdn.vine.co" or \mtc.cdn.vine.co" to download the s in the \Explore" page where it tries to offer services like video clips and the corresponding thumbnails according to traditional video sharing sites such as Youtube. The oth- the URLs provided by the Vine server. The same thing hap- er two pages are for the normal usage: the \Activity" page pens when a user searches and views his interested videos in acts as the notification center showing the recent events re- the \Explore" page. The slight difference is that the static lated to the current user; and the user can customize his web images in this page (such as the pictures for the chan- personal settings in the \Profile" page. The social relation- nels) are distributed by Amazon CloudFront. ship in Vine is the follower-following relationship, which is Figure 2 shows another important operation scenario where similar to a number of other social network services, such as a mobile user makes a new post on Vine. First, the user us- Twitter, Instagram, Flickr.