Twitter launches Vine, an easy way to share short video clips with your social networks

Twitter launched their first foray yesterday into the non-text content realm with Vine, an app that lets you share six-second video clips with your friends.

Vine videos are intentionally easy to create. Vine is recording anytime your thumb is held on the screen; it stops when you let up. The clips are threaded together into a single, six-second looping video with no editing required (or even available).

Like any good social app, Vine lets you share content to Facebook and Twitter, where the videos are — of course — embedded directly into the tweet stream, not blocked like Instagram photos. Clips can be tagged with a location from Foursquare, but there’s not a way to share them with your Foursquare friends. Tapping a location name does allow you to browse all the public clips that have been shot there.

The simplicity makes Vine like an Instagram for video, hoping to capitalize on users who want to share quick moments with their friends. The lack of editing, or even an “undo”function, makes it simple, but it’s also easy to ruin an entire video with one errant clip, forcing users to start over from the beginning.

Vine suffered through a tough launch day, with a crashing issue, problems sharing to Twitter and Facebook, and locations unavailable from Foursquare (due their outage in the morning). All those issues seem to have cleared up now. Facebook also blocked their friend-finding feature within hours of the launch.

With Vine, Twitter finally has a content arm of their own instead of simply linking to content held on other sites. They should also have a big enough audience to see some success where other apps like GLMPS and Viddy have struggled.

What do you think of Vine?