Vine now lets friends share video and text messages
Jumping on the messaging trend, the Twitter-owned video app introduces direct one-to-one messaging.
What do you get when you cross Snapchat with Instagram Direct image messaging? Vine messages.
Twitter-owned Vine introduced a new messaging feature on Thursday that lets users send video and text messages to anyone on Vine. The feature also gives users the capability to send videos to anyone in their personal address book, even if they're not on Vine.
"From Vine's early days, we recognized that there was a growing desire and need for private messaging on Vine," Vine Product Manager Jason Toff wrote in a blog post. "We've watched the community come up with some clever ways to send videos to their friends as we've been working on this solution."
The premise behind Vine is that anyone can create and share looping six-second video clips, but before now they'd just be sent out into the ether. Vine messages let users record videos to send to individuals or multiple people. If users don't want to get messages from people they don't know, they can configure that into their settings.
With messages, Vine appears to be jumping onto the messaging trend. Instagram introduced Direct image messaging in December and Snapchat has long-allowed users to send each other videos. Facebook will also be launching into more messaging with its recent WhatsApp acquisition.