The video app Vine acquisition shows up on Twitter, signals integrated video is coming soon

By Francis Bea January 23, 2013

vine in twitter — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Vine, the video sharing app scooped up by Twitter in October of last year (mysteriously pre-launch), made it fairly clear that Twitter intended to launch its own integrated video app. Today Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo retweeted a Vine video embedded within a tweet, signaling that the acquisition may finally be playing out.

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

— dick costolo (@dickc) January 23, 2013

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Vine out in the wild. When news of the deal first broke, we saw some of the work of early Vine users. However, the embedded tweet means something new is happening here. Costolo’s tweet isn’t the first, either. We did some quick digging and noticed that the first tweet embedded with a Vine link dated back to two days ago from a tweet by @ckb, who happens to be the Vine co-founder.

To recap, the video app loops through (like an animated gif with sound) one second snippets of video that are threaded together.

We noticed a couple of tweaks to Vine. First is an update to its branding, based on a “then and now” look at the landing page text.

October 2012: “Vine is the best way to capture and share video on your iPhone. No editing. No rendering. No post-production. Video has never been this fun.”
January 2013: “The best way to see and share life in motion. Create beautiful looping videos in a fun way, then share with your friends and family.”

Off the bat, you’ll notice that Vine is now friends and family oriented, and shed its image as a quick technical app for producing and sharing video. On a more trivial note, any mention of “iPhone” in the latest copy from this year has disappeared.

Feature-wise, this time users can actually pause and even mute videos in-app, which wasn’t previously available.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and we’ll keep you updated on new developments.

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