In an entirely surprising turn of events, Thursday saw microblogging social network Twitter launching its own video app, Vine. Users can capture short videos of up to 6 seconds’ duration and run it on loop using this app. As of now, this app is available only for iOS users – so iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users can download and use this app currently.
In keeping with Twitter’s theme of brevity, this app is also aimed at inspiring creativity among its users. According to a blog post by Twitter, Vine’s posts are about abbreviation, shortening something longer.
However, moments after Twitter announced this new app, privacy concerns began to get raised. Some users reported that they were able to view other users’ private contact information when they logged into the app, including e-mail addresses and phone numbers. This issue led Twitter to disable Facebook sharing shortly after the app’s launch.
Twitter later stated that the issue was caused due to a bug which caused accounts to get cross-wired. However, the company denied reports that users were able to post content from others’ social accounts due to this bug.
Twitter recently acquired Vine, possibly to compete with Google’s giant video-sharing social network, YouTube. But the real question is if it will find as many takers and spell success for Twitter.
