There’s a moment, tragically brief, after a new recording or broadcasting tool is introduced when it’s used unselfconsciously, with an endearingly human innocence and enthusiasm. That moment, for Twitter’s video-shooting app Vine, is now. Vine brings the Twitter ethos to the motion picture, imposing a six-second limit on recordings. A site called Vinepeek is randomly streaming new vines, and there’s something at once enervating and exhilarating about watching the clips zip by. It’s mostly the banal stuff you’d expect—kids, pets, meals, tourist shots—but there are also some charmingly clumsy time-lapse and stop-motion experiments, stories trying to be born. And the best thing is: the pervs and promoters haven’t moved in yet. (UPDATE: You may now disregard that last sentence. Vine has been deflowered.)

This will get old fast, but right now it’s new, and alive.

Image from the vine “There might be zombies here” by micro-auteur Chloe Alexandra.