Twitter gets animated with its latest acquisition, Vine

Big news coming out of Twitter today with the announcement that the company has acquired and launched Vine – a short video creation service.

Vine lets users create videos that are six seconds or shorter, which can then be shared on the company’s site, vine.co, or Twitter and Facebook.  Think of it as Instagram meets animated gifs.

Writing on its blog today Twitter said the reason for the acquisition was to promote creativity on the site, while Vine said that the companies shared a vision of creating short engaging content.

Twitter’s acquisition of Vine is further evidence that the major social networks are increasingly turning to images and photography to encourage us to share.  We saw this trend begin last year when Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion and also made numerous changes to how it managed users’ images.  Google likewise competed, with the release of image editing abilities in Google+ and Twitter released its own image filtering service.

Finding new vines on the site is difficult at the moment as the site is still very much in development (the site’s explore section is still under wraps).  Meanwhile, you can use advanced Google Search operators to find them.

A technical hitch at the time of writing means we can’t embed any more examples of vines but you can check them out on the website.