Today, with the launch of their new vine.co web experience, the Twitter-owned six-second video app has finally become a fully realized video-sharing website.
Vine launched its web presence back in January, but it was stripped down and in no way mimicked the Vine app experience. Users could browse their own home feed and scroll through feeds of specific users. There was an admittedly addictive, yet underwhelming functional TV mode that let users watch videos in sequence. At the time, Vine said that this was just the first step toward a “richer web experience,” and today they’ve delivered on that promise.
“Up until now, the primary way to watch, share and discover Vine videos has been on your phone. We’ve heard from the Vine community that you sometimes want to explore Vine and view videos on your computer too. Today, we’re excited to introduce a brand-new version of vine.co, which adds a bunch of new features that will help you find and discover Vine videos on the web,” says Vine in a blog post.
First off, Vine’s website now has a new search tool that lets you search keywords that will pull up results for people, hashtags, content, and even locations. If you’re looking for Vines about cats, it’s now easier to pull up millions of short videos about cats. Sounds like other video-sharing websites of note.
The Explore page on the web features curated playlists, featured Vine videos, a “popular now” section, trending tags, featured Viners, and more.
Most importantly, however, is the fact that you can do all of this without ever logging in.
It’s this move that makes the new Vine site feel more like a resource for finding videos. Anyone can just go to Vine and search for all public Vine videos. Pretty neat.
This is Vine’s move to go big, and go public. Earlly last month, Vine made a move to go small and private by unveiling private messaging to compete with the likes of Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
Go check it out. Caution, it’s now really easy to lose an hour watching dumb Vine videos. You’ve been warned.
Image via Vine.co screenshot