Getting acquainted with social networks and apps: it is time to talk about TikTok
| Published date | 08 February 2020 |
| Date | 08 February 2020 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHTN-01-2020-0001 |
| Pages | 7-12 |
| Author | Katie Elson Anderson |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Library & information services |
Getting acquainted with social networks and apps:
it is time to talk about TikTok
Katie Elson Anderson
In today’s swiftly moving social
media app landscape, it can be
challenging to determine which new
apps will be the ones that will still be
around by the time they have been
written about. There are many examples
of apps that appear with some fanfare
and then either disappear because of a
lack of interest and users, are bought by
competing or larger platforms or remain
useful and important to the core users
but disappear from wider attention.
Examples of smaller apps that received
some press but did not catch on beyond
the target communities include Ello[1]
marketed as a “community of artists”;
Mastodon[2], proposed as an alternative
to Twitter with a stronger code of
conduct to address hateful content;
Gab[3], where many users who are
kicked off of Twitter convene; Parler[4],
marketed as an alternative to twitter,
associated with Trump supporters and
right-wing politics; and Voat[5],
marketed as a censorship free Reddit
alternative. Many of these apps target
audiences interested in less censorship
and more forgiving codes of conduct
than the bigger social media platforms.
Examples of social media platforms that
are no longer in existence include Path,
a photo sharing social networking
service that shut down in 2018 (Dent,
2018); Delicious, a social bookmarking
app that was acquired and currently
exists in read-only (Lekach, 2017); Yik
Yak, an anonymous message board app
marketed toward college and university
audiences that ceased in 2017 (Carson,
2017); Googleþ, Google’s attempt to
compete with Facebook that was
shuttered by Google in April 2019
(Hern, 2019a); Meerkat, a live video
streaming social media app (Kumparak,
2016); and Vine, a social media
application for creation and sharing of
short-form videos owned by Twitter and
it shut down in 2017 (McAlone, 2015).
There are certainly many more apps
than those listed here that are still
functioning and others that have come
and gone. Some of the apps that are no
longer active were used, researched and
written about by libraries and librarians,
demonstrating the early adoption of
social media apps in the profession and
the ability to adapt to a continuously
changing landscape. While the
platforms may no longer be active, the
papers build the scholarship and
practice around the changes and inform
future work with social media
applications. A brief search within
library literature resulted in papers on
Yik Yak (Price and Richardson, 2017;
Price, 2018), Googleþ(Frederick,
2013;Anderson and Still, 2011), Vine
(Ekart, 2013;Fichter and Wisniewski,
2014) and others such as Meerkat and
YouNow (Lesure, 2015).
An important skill in being able to
adapt to the changing landscape is to
recognize that the current app may not
exist in a year or another one is likely to
replace it, and the knowledge, skills and
tools acquired in using and researching
one can be applied to the next. It is
important to be aware of trends within
social media to decide which apps to
explore and embrace. A growing trend
in social media has been the popularity
of video creation and sharing, from
short looping videos to live-streaming
(Anderson, 2017). Facebook, Instagram
and Snapchat all have “stories”
functionality where users can create
short videos (around 3-15 s depending
on the app) that will be displayed on a
loop. Any videos uploaded on Twitter
will also loop videos under 6.5 s
(Constine, 2017). The concept of a short
looping video to tell a story did not start
with these larger platforms. About a
year before Snapchat released “My
Story” (Hamburger, 2013), Vine was
being used to create and share 6-s long
looping videos. Created in 2012 and
acquired by Twitter even before it was
released, Vine was a popular and unique
video sharing app that was discontinued
in 2017. Some of the YouTube stars of
today gained their audience via Vine
before moving on to other platforms
with better monetization models
(Kosoff, 2016). Vine was shut down in
early 2017, and by then, Facebook,
Instagram and Snapchat all provided
similar services, but the demise was
lamented as the loss of “one of the
internet’s weirdest and funniest spaces”
with Vine being credited as having been
an unparalleled space for creation of
memes that traveled into mainstream
culture (Feldman, 2016).
Another popular app where users
could create short looping videos was
Musical.ly, which was released in April
2014. Unlike Vine, which was a free
form video creation app, Musical.ly was
designed to be a lip-synching platform.
Users could choose a soundtrack and
use different speed options to record lip-
synching and dancing routines from15 s
to 1min long. Musical.ly was the most
downloaded app in the Apple store in
2015 (Bonfiglio, 2019).
In September 2016, the Chinese
company ByteDance released a similar
lip-synching video creation app called
Douyin and then launched TikTok for
markets outside of China. In November
2017, ByteDance purchased Musical.ly
and merged it with TikTok in 2018.
With over 176 million downloads in the
third quarter of 2019 (Business of Apps,
2020), TikTok was the second most
downloaded Android app worldwide
(Priori Data, 2020a) and the fifth most
downloaded app worldwide from the
Apple store (Priori Data, 2020b).
When Vine was shut down, many
users moved to Musical.ly, and it is not
surprising that after the merger, TikTok
has been compared to Vine, though
some Vine enthusiasts will disagree that
it is a viable replacement. The memes,
LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 4 2020, pp. 7-12, V
CEmerald Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/LHTN-01-2020-0001 7
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