Vine, the new short video creation and sharing app for iPhone launched by Twitter last Thursday, is celebrating its first five days of public availability.
On Tuesday, Vine founder Dom Hofmann published a new post on the official Vine blog thanking early adopters for their “continuing interest and support.”
“It’s been less than a week since we launched Vine, and you’ve blown us away,” Hoffman wrote. “In the past few days, your creativity and insights into the world around you have made people laugh, smile, and come together in a new and profound way. It’s inspiring to watch this community grow — you’ve created so many great posts already!”
Hofmann included some of the Vine team’s favorite posts to show off the capabilities of the app, which allows users to create 6-second-long videos made up of multiple quick cuts, and to share the videos to Twitter, Facebook and within the Vine app’s own social networking feed as well. Here’s one of them from Paul McCartney:
Can you name this song…? vine.co/v/bJjdTLBnwx1
— Paul McCartney (@PaulMcCartney) January 29, 2013
Hofmann sidestepped some recent minor controversies that arose in the wake of Vine’s launch, however, from an early glitch that allowed some users to access and post from others’ accounts, to the more recent flourishing and quick crackdown on pornographic, sexually-themed and other not-safe-for-work (NSFW) videos that some accounts have been posting with regularity.
A Twitter spokesperson told Mashable on Tuesday afternoon that the company was “experimenting” with different ways of filtering and surfacing videos on Vine.
Vine also suffered a brief outage on Tuesday afternoon.
That said, Vine has clearly quickly attained a high profile among prominent social media users, celebrities and major brands: Among those who have picked up the app have been everyone from Paul McCartney (the Beatle) to Jimmy Fallon to Gap. News organizations have also tested it out, including CNN and NBC New York.
Hofmann didn’t provide any statistics on how many users total had downloaded the app, posted from it, or how many posts total had been made using Vine.
Topsy, a social media analytics company that works with Twitter, recorded at least 128,000 links shared on social media linking to the Vine domain (“Vine.co”) and mentioning the app.
Hofmann also noted in his blog post that “there are some changes on the way that we think you’re going to love,” but didn’t elaborate on what those might be.
On his personal Twitter account, Hoffman has mentioned that he and his colleagues are working on everything from sharing Vine video posts directly to the Web (rather than Facebook or Twitter), to having the ability to share previously posted videos out again to Facebook and Twitter, and easier ways to cancel video uploads.
TPM has reached out to Vine’s parent company Twitter for more specifics on how much usage Vine has seen, what the company is doing about the controversies and what future changes may include and will update when we receive a response.
Twitter acquired Vine and its development team back in October 2012, well before the app was finished or ready to launch.
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