Vine Update Adds User Mentions In Posts, Front-Facing Camera Support

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Everyone’s favorite tiny video maker Vine just updated their app with a few important features. First, the service has added front-facing camera support, allowing you to swap camera angles mid-Vine. You can also now @ identify folks by pressing the “mention” button when publishing the post.

We attempted to try the new features here, resulting in some serious cinematographic art.

There is also improved people search so you can find friends in the service based on their Twitter handles. The more things change, the more they add front-facing camera support. The updated app is available for download now.

Just Six Months After Being Acquired, Twitter’s Vine Hits #1 Free Spot On Apple’s App Store

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Twitter acquired the mini-video-taking app Vine last October before it ever launched, sending everyone into a frenzy about the company getting into the video space.

In late January, Twitter finally launched the app to much applause. Since then, it’s gone from being temporarily removed from the featured section due to an issue over adult content to being used in interesting ways by brands and celebrities.

Today, it all paid off, as it hit the top of the charts for free apps in the U.S., according to co-founder and Creative Director Rus Yusupov:

It’s a pretty impressive feat for any app that’s not a game to hit this spot, and it’s also impressive for Twitter to have another presence on the list, in addition to their own core app. Clearly the push from Twitter helped the cause. The top app on the free store gets quite a bit of downloads after it hits the spot, eventually coming back down to earth after a quick explosion.

The charts are based on new downloads and the trajectory of its current download popularity. Therefore Twitter’s own app sits at No. 35, which just means that a lot of people have already downloaded it. When an app is at the top of the charts for a long time, it’s safe to say that there are a lot of new users being onboarded daily.

Vine’s closest competition in the social sphere? Snapchat. And even then, a few games stand between the two. The good news for Vine and Twitter is that the service is iOS-only at the moment, which means there is quite a bit more growth for the app to experience, much like Instagram did when it went over to the Android platform. Nearly half of all Instagram users are Android users.

The multi-app approach is working for social companies, as all you have to do is look at Facebook’s success with Messenger, Instagram and the quick-hit Poke to get the idea. Once a big platform starts splintering off smaller experiences with focus like video, or, say, eventually music, its main audience will of course at least give them a try.

Twitter’s Vine App Now Supports Embeds, Expanded Sharing To Facebook & Twitter

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Twitter’s Vine app received a small, but notable, update today which allows the videos you create to be embedded across the web. The embedded posts are available in two styles (simple and postcard), and can be created directly within the mobile app itself or from a post’s page on Vine.co.

In order to access the new functionality, users will have to update their iOS application from the iTunes App Store. An Android version of Vine, unfortunately, is still not available. Once installed, you just tap the more button (the one with the dots “…”) at the bottom right of your Vine post, and choose the “Share Post” button from the menu that appears. Then choose the “Embed” option to grab the code, which is available from a link you can copy or email.

As for the embedding options, the “Simple” view shows just the Vine video itself, while the “Postcard” view is branded, and includes your name and date of the post at the top, as well as your post description below. The embeds are available in 320px, 480px, and 600px sizes.

The updated app also introduces expanded Facebook and Twitter sharing options. You’ll find options to post to these services from this “Share” screen both here on your own Vine posts, as well as on posts from others, provided they’ve first shared their post outside of Vine.

“When we launched Vine, we described posts as ‘little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life,’” writes Vine GM Dom Hofmann on the company blog. “With today’s update, you can display them almost anywhere,” he says.

Early Vine Use Sees Video App Rising On iOS While Cinemagram, Viddy, Socialcam All Decline

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Call it a fad, call it the Twitter effect, or call it another example of when it pays not to be the first mover, but it looks like two months out of the gate, Twitter’s short-form video-sharing app Vine is picking up users like they’re going out of style.

According to figures from Onavo Insights, which tracks usage of apps across iOS devices in the U.S., since going live in January, Vine has grown its monthly active users by 50% in the last month, and it was used on 2.66% of all iOS devices in the U.S. by the end of February.

It doesn’t look like Vine’s rising tide is lifting all boats. Three other video-sharing apps on iOS — Cinemagram, SocialCam and Viddy — have at the same time declined, with their monthly active users in general down since December. February saw U.S. device usage of 1.07% for Cinemagram, 0.50% for SocialCam and 0.31% for Viddy.

These numbers are somewhat comparable with those of another analytics company, RJ Metrics, which measured Vine use compared to Viddy and Socialcam on Twitter itself. It found that in its first month, Vine was used by 2.8% of Twitter’s highly active users with Viddy used by 0.5% and Socialcam by 0.2%.

It also follows the pattern established early on in its life.

While Onavo doesn’t have comparative stats for how well those three apps did in their first couple of months of usage (it wasn’t tracking this data back then), it notes that in fact Vine is bigger now than any one of them has been in the last six months. Viddy and SocialCam have both been in a general decline, while Cinemagram saw a decent boost in the autumn of last year, only to also begin declining in December.

Vine’s rise is interesting in the context of another social network’s launch of a picture-based app. Facebook’s debut of Poke, the ephemeral picture messaging app that was seen as Facebook’s answer to Snapchat, got a lot of attention when it first arrived, but that appeared to quickly disappear when it came to picking up active users. As Poke interest has died down, Snapchat has continued to grow. Today, they stand at 12% for Snapchat and 0.25% for Facebook’s Poke.

One possible message here is that you may have a better chance of succeeding if you’re entering a market that is not yet owned by any one company, regardless of whether you are launching off the back of a wildly popular social media platform or not. Vine was entering a space where its closest competitor was being used by only 1.3% of iPhone owners and falling. Snapchat, by comparison, was being used by 10% and rising when Poke decided to Poke it. In general, video on mobile is still a wide-open space, with video apps used only by about 4% of highly active users on Twitter, according to RJMetrics.

It’s telling that when Twitter launched photo filters, it chose to do them in Twitter itself rather than as a separate service. On the competitive landscape, Instagram, Onavo tells me, is used by 32.3% of iPhone owners in the U.S. on a monthly basis.

Coming up, it will be interesting to see how this plays out with usage, and rollout, of a reported launch of a Twitter music app up ahead. The most used music app on iOS in the U.S., Onavo says, is Pandora at 31.8% of U.S. users accessing it monthly, with Spotify at 7.14%.

After Its Porn Problem, Twitter-Owned Vine Adds 17+ Age Rating To Video Sharing App

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Vine, the Twitter-owned video sharing iOS app which lets users knit together snippets of video to create six second loops, has had its user age rating increased to 17+. The increase was bundled in a v1.0.5 app update which requires users to confirm they are “at least 17 years old” before the download begins, and warns of “frequent/intense sexual content or nudity”, among other warnings of “infrequent” drugs, alcohol, tobacco, horror/fear themes, profanity/crude humor and realistic violence, to name a few.

The change was spotted earlier by the Verge which noted that Vine previously had a 12+ rating on the app (also related: late last month Vine started censoring searches to try to weed out pornographic terms). In addition to the age increase, the v1.0.5 update adds the ability to report or block a profile. A message in the update’s ‘What’s new’ section adds: “We’re listening: please reach out to us at feedback@vineapp.com with any issues or suggestions.”

Twitter Brings Large, Lightboxed Photos To The Web, Adds Video From Vine, YouTube And More To Media Galleries

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Twitter has announced a couple of updates for its web service today, designed around media sharing. There’s a new interface for viewing photos, which provides a larger look at pictures without forcing users to leave the page thanks to a lightbox overlay, accessible when you click a photo from a profile page or in search results. And video from Vine, YouTube, Vimeo, and any other partner whose movie clips show up in expanded tweets now also shows up in a user’s media gallery alongside photos.

Also new is an improved conversation view, which lets you see all of the replies to a Tweet by scrolling down. You can see it in action on this call-out from Jimmy Fallon, which also illustrates its best uses. Brands and media entities will likely love this feature, since it provides a better way to not only keep track of Twitter conversations, but also should promote more engagement and conversation branching among users.

The addition of video to media galleries is a logical next step for Twitter, especially following the launch of Vine. Truth be told, it’s likely they wanted to be able to highlight all that new user-generated content somewhere on Twitter itself, but it’s nice to see them extend that courtesy to other video partners as well.

Twitter’s Vine Experiences Its First Service Outage 5 Days After Launching

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Vine, Twitter’s latest foray into video sharing, seems to be having some service issues at the moment. We’ve been trying to access and use the app here at TechCrunch with no progress, and Vine has tweeted to confirm the service issues.

Vine launched last Thursday and has had a whirlwind of a week. Though relatively buggy for an app launched by a major company like Twitter, Vine was welcomed by the tech blogosphere as the next Instagram, as it lets you share six-second looping videos (with or without sound) to all your favorite social networks. However, the fun ended quickly as users noticed a slight porn problem on the app.

A porn clip called “DildoPlay,” which showed up on the app’s Editors’ Picks section on Monday, made matters even worse. Twitter claims that the clip was chosen because of “human error.”

Then, Apple removed Vine from the App Store’s Featured section, presumably after seeing that a porn clip had been featured within the app. Vine has since started censoring the app, filtering out searches for various porn-related search terms.

Today, the string of obstacles gets a bit longer with the reported service outage.

Vine is experiencing a temporary service interruption. Thanks for your patience.

— Vine (@vineapp) January 29, 2013

Is everyone looking for the newly-hidden pr0n on Vine all at once, because the service appears to be down.

— Eric Zeman (@phonescooper) January 29, 2013