Vine, Twitter's 6-Second Video Sharing App Is Live

Faster than expected perhaps, Twitter has made Vine, its six-second video sharing service available to iPhone and iPod touch users. Twitter promises other platforms will follow soon enough.

It's the first Twitter app that's separate from the core service and one of Twitter's biggest departures to date. But, in the wake of Instagram's success, it makes sense.

There have been a number of video sharing apps that tried to mimic Instagram's success but none have managed it so far. There's no guarantee that Vine will do it, but the Twitter integration will help.

Up until Facebook acquired it, Instagram had a tight relationship with Twitter. It must be missing all those Instagram tweets, but they're not coming back anytime soon.

The Vine app is as simple as it gets, perhaps for the best; you can shoot a short video, of up to six seconds, and share it on Twitter or inside the app.

The videos are embedded in a tweet and play back to back and they're more like GIFs than YouTube videos, which may actually be a good thing, Twitter may be on to something here.