Twitter has officially launched its Vine video sharing app in the App Store, as announced on the company blog.
With Instagram taking the world by storm, and subsequently selling to Facebook for $1 billion, the question on everyone’s minds has been who will be able to do the same thing with video?
Twitter’s been thinking this through for a while, proven by the acquisition of video-sharing app Vine in October.
The app isn’t built directly into Twitter, but rather acts as a standalone app.
It integrates with Twitter in the same way that Instagram does, except that Vine never turned off permissions randomly, meaning that Vine videos can be embedded directly in tweets, showing up in followers’ streams.
Vine videos can also show up in a separate Vine web page, like this one.
Users can also follow other Viners separately throughout the app, as well as comment and like videos. Again, a lot like Instagram.
There are already plenty of video-sharing apps out there, like Viddy and SocialCam, but Vine works differently in that it lets you shoot multiple short cuts to make one single, 6-second video.
The process is easy and involves no editing. Simply hold your finger to the screen, and the app is recording. When you remove your thumb, recording stops, and can be started again by replacing your thumb to the screen. This lets users record multiple short clips that are threaded together into a continuous video.
The first Vine clip ever shared came from Dick Costolo on January 23, and is a good representation of what the service is capable of:
The app is available now in the App Store for iPhone and iPod touch, and can be found here.
Update: The app seems to be having a buggy launch so far. Authorizing forces the app to shut down. We’re trying to get in and grab screenshots as we speak.