Twitter introduces Vine app for sharing video

Haven't been able to post enough videos of your adorable cat, baby or girlfriend on Twitter? Fear no more, Twitter has introduced Vine, a free video-sharing iPhone app that takes short snippets up to 10 seconds in length and blasts them to Twitter, Facebook and/or the Vine.co website.

Those snippets are played ad infinitum, kinda fun if you do something like spinning around in a chair for 10 seconds like I did. Well, I was going to post a link to that video, but Vine is apparently a wee bit overwhelmed today:

Here's a link to an earlier Vine video for your viewing pleasure.

Once you've installed Vine, it asks you to either create a new account or sign in with Twitter. I chose to do the latter, yet couldn't use my Twitter name (not my handle) as it has characters (a couple of Apple icons) in it that are apparently not kosher. Vine grabs your Twitter profile, all of which you can change except for your bio -- apparently, if you want to change that, you need to change the Twitter bio. Sigh.

Vine then runs you through a short tutorial on how to shoot video. Any time you touch the screen, it will capture video up to a total of that magic 10 seconds. Tap the Next button, select the services you wish to share the video on, choose whether or not to geotag the video and then let it blast out to the world.

There are discovery tools built into the Vine app, providing a choice of editor-curated loops, videos that are marked with a particular hash tag and posts that are just very popular. Tapping on any video you're watching pauses it or restarts viewing, and unlike the similar Lightt app, Vine provides audio to go along with your masterpiece. In the official Twitter iOS app, tapping on a tweet containing a Vine link displays the video immediately.

Whether or not the world really needs another way of sharing videos of people and animals behaving badly seems to be a moot point. Vine's here, and it's sure to get the attention of a lot of iPhone users.