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Vine grows to 40 million users, despite Instagram challenge

Regardless of competition from Instagram's recently released video offering, Twitter's 6-second-video app is adding new users at a rapid clip.

Jennifer Van Grove Former Senior Writer / News
Jennifer Van Grove covered the social beat for CNET. She loves Boo the dog, CrossFit, and eating vegan. Her jokes are often in poor taste, but her articles are not.
Jennifer Van Grove
Jason Cipriani/CNET

Seven months since its release, Twitter's Vine application for shooting and sharing 6-second looped videos has racked up 40 million registered users, the company announced in a tweet Tuesday.

Launched in late January on iOS, Vine lets smartphone owners record little video snippets, bit by bit, to create miniature movies. By the time of its release on Android in June, Vine had attracted 13 million registered users, but an early July update that introduced channels and "revines," aka shares, raised the profile of emerging Vine stars and allowed videos to go viral.

The new user metric demonstrates massive pickup in the past two months and suggests that the application has carved out its own distinct niche in social-media land, and isn't at risk of falling victim to Instagram's video offering, as was initially suggested.