Twitter delves into video with Vine, suffers launch hiccups

Twitter has launched its own video capture service, with an app that will let users of the social network take and post short films using mobile phones.

The new service, called Vine, will allow users to take videos up to six seconds long and embed them into their tweets.

The app is initially available free for the iPhone and iPod Touch from the Apple App Store, but not yet for other platforms.

Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive, posted footage using the software through his @DickC account, showing him making steak tartare in a video that resembled gif animated footage.

Steak tartare in six seconds. vine.co/v/bOIqn6rLeIDvia @dhof

— dick costolo (@dickc) January 23, 2013

Twitter's Vice-President of Product Michael Sippey wrote on his blog: "Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (six seconds or less) inspires creativity."

Twitter has acquired New York start-up Vine Labs, which is behind the technology, it said. It is unrelated to Microsoft's former Twitter-like urgent alerts notification service by the same name. After three years of development, Microsoft Vine launched in 2009 as a limited beta, but the service was discontinued the following year.

Dom Hofmann, the co-founder and general manager of Twitter's Vine, wrote on the company's website: "Like Twitter, we want to make it easier for people to come together to share and discover what's happening in the world."

"We also believe constraint inspires creativity, whether it's through a 140-character tweet or a six-second video."

He added: "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."

The launch of the new service has not been without issues. Users discovered that when using Vine, sharing their tweets would sometimes result in it being posted to other users' accounts. PopTip founder Kelsey Falter was one user that found her company's Twitter account was used to post someone else's post from the Vine app.

@vineapp someone else has posted from St. Louis using the @poptip handle (not us) -- crossing users? cc/ @dickc

— Kelsey Falter (@kfalter) January 24, 2013

Vine quickly pulled the ability to share videos to Facebook and Twitter, leading to speculation that Facebook had blocked Vine users from its network.

It has now restored sharing services, and appeared to rectify its issues.