This is a bit of a stretch, but it occurred to me while using vine, that you could look at some of the culture of reddit and use it predict what might be a successful app.

Animated Gifs

Animated gifs are commonly used as replies in reddit comment threads. It’s a bit of a stretch comparing Vine videos to animated gifs, but they definitely could have been inspired by. Vine videos are about 6.5 seconds long, optionally have audio and you create them on your mobile device (Android, iPhone). Something I don’t think you could have predicted from the rise of animated gifs would be all the creativity of people recording themselves on their phone. Most of the animated gifs on reddit are extracted from youtube videos.

Images

Reddit doesn’t host images, it only allows text posts, so to fill the niche of a reliable image hosting service, Imgur was created in 2009. It’s a bit of a leap to go from Imgur to Instagram, but it’s the same thing right, sharing images in a social way. I guess something that vine and instagram have in common is the basic mechanic of creating content on the go and then building a social network around that content, with likes, faves, and reposting content.

Memes

Advice animals, those images that you see posted with text above and text below….

Came out of /b/ on 4chan, but found a permanent home on Reddit. A few meme generators have been created, making it easy for people to create and host these memes. I don’t really see memes as having a great chance of becoming the next big mobile social network, but you never know right?

Localreddits

I found this interesting subreddit the other day, it’s ModsOfTheRealms, and it’s a reddit for moderators of local reddits. Local reddits are things like /r/sydney or /r/wellington, subreddits that are designed for citizens of a local town. I really think this localreddit phenomenon could be a good indicator of a need for people to connect locally. Imagine a mobile app designed for people in a city, with the content of the /r/wellington reddit - but with the traffic of /r/pics. I’m not sure what the largest city-based reddit is - /r/nyc has over 47,000 users, so I guess you could study that and see what it’d be like if you made a Wellington-based forum that was as popular as a larger metro one.