On Monday, Google announced that it will retire Google Checkout in November 2013.

What does that mean for organizations using Google Checkout to accept online payments? As Google notes:

On Thursday last week, Twitter, the company that lead the world in an effort to compress text communications into 140-character snippets, announced their newest way to miniaturize human communication:  6 second videos.  Their new service, called Vine, makes it very easy to create extremely short video clips on a mobile device and then instantly share them with the world on the Twitter network.

Unlike the longer video clips that you're probably producing and then distributing via other channels such as YouTube or Vimeo, Twitter purposefully intends to make you focus on getting to the point very, very fast.  Your video displays directly within your Tweet, and directly within your Twitter stream.  The videos you produce on Vine loop, and for those that remember the good old days of Web 1.0, definitely have a feeling of the animated GIF returning to popular culture.  Twitter describes Vine like this:

Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger. They're little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They're quirky, and we think that's part of what makes them so special.

As communication professionals trying to move supporters and donors up the ladder of engagement, how might Vine be useful for your online communication strategies?  Here's a few ideas that could be useful for organizations starting to explore the benefits of these short video clips.