Vine for iOS ripens with camera tools, private accounts, and 'revines'
With the update, short-and-sweet video clips are easier to capture and share.
Vine, the Twitter-owned video app for creating loopy videos, was updated Wednesday with new tools for shooting, sharing, and discovering 6-second clips.
The application, which has more than 13 million registered users, now lets people on iOS, and soon Android, capture video bits with handy camera tools such as a grid, a focus option, and a ghost button for viewing a transparent overlay of your previous shot.
On the sharing and discovery side of things, Vine added the "revine," or its version of the retweet, so people can click to repost a video to their followers. The app also comes with a new channels section inside the Explore tab for surfing through videos by topics such as comedy or cats. An "On the Rise" section, also new to the Explore area, introduces users to Vines from people the app deems to be rising video stars.
And if privacy is your preference, the service added an option to its settings panel that lets you lock down your account so that your Vine videos are only viewable to the people who you let follow your account.
Altogether, the features add some creative flavor and sagacity to a still maturing application that's facing stiff competition from Instagram. The features, though not a huge draw, should act to remind existing users of Vine's unique novelty. And ideally, with the help of discovery tools and revines, people will become preoccupied with consuming video for much longer than 6 seconds.
Vine said that an Android release with the same features is slated for next week, but the protected posts account option will arrive in a little update slated for later in the day.