At the start of this year, Twitter introduced the mobile video app Vine, which let people shoot and share bite-size, six-second looping video clips. The service captivated users, who began making and uploading quirky short films, comedy bits and stop-motion animation, among other things.
On Monday, Twitter announced in a blog post that in four months, Vine had attracted 13 million people to sign up for the service. Twitter did not say how many of them were active users, but the third-party service Topsy has estimated that, on average, Vine users post 12 million videos on Twitter every day. Part of the appeal of Vine lies in its simplicity, particularly the interface of the tool, which lets people shoot and edit clips by tapping the screen and quickly uploading them to the app and to the Web. One of Vine’s creators, Dom Hofmann, said in a previous interview that the success of Vine was tied to its easy-to-use design. He said that although it took people longer to initially figure out how to use Vine, once they started shooting and sharing videos, their interest did not diminish.
“The time between the first and second post is much longer than the fifth and sixth. It get steady after that. It clicks,†he said. “People are getting creative, and the audience is growing.â€
Vine seems to fit into the wave of simpler, more creative and expressive social media platforms that have been drawing attention as Facebook’s appeal fades somewhat. Services like Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat are also part of that wave.
Still, Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service acquired by Facebook that lets people add filters to their camera phone photos and share them with friends, took nearly a year to reach 10 million users.
Twitter also said Monday that it was releasing a version of its video-editing tool for Android. Previously, it was only available for iOS devices.
