In January, Twitter unveiled a new mobile service called Vine, which allows users to create and share looping videos. “Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity,” the company said in an official blog post. “Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.”
Vine is available as a separate app, free for download on iPhone and iPod touch devices via the Apple App Store. It’s exclusively on mobile for the time being. “We’re working now to bring it to other platforms, so stay tuned for that,” the company added.
Some thoughts from Twitter about Vine:
Strive for simplicity
An interface should get out of the way. People should be able to focus on being creative, not on how to use the app. In many ways, interface design is like film editing: if you notice it, it wasn’t done well.
Iterate, again and again
From the start, we wanted to create a new way to capture life in motion. (Admittedly, we didn’t know what that would look like exactly.) We actually redesigned the app three times before going live. While Vine is now live, that spirit of constant iteration remains core to the decisions we make.
Early Vine visual design explorations
Be thoughtful. Each interaction, feature and design element should help you share the moments of your lives. We didn’t want to add anything simply for the sake of adding it. An earlier version of Vine had a persistent title bar and bottom menu; we decided to remove the bottom menu because it took away from the space where videos lived.