Share 6-second videos over Twitter with Vine

After the recent tease, Twitter has now launched Vine. Vine is an app that is only available on the iPhone and the iPod Touch right now, but is expected to come to Android soon enough. It lets users capture and share short looping videos. You can grab the app here.

The videos play when a tweet is expanded, and appear like animated GIF images. There is also the option to have sound with the video. According to the Twitter blog, “Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity.” Vine also shares Twitter’s idea that constraint inspires creativity, be it through a 140-character tweet, or a six second video through Vine.

The company notes, however, that despite it being acquired by Twitter, users don’t need a Twitter account to use Vine, but signing up to use the app is quicker if a Twitter account is used.

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Vine is available for the iPhone and iPod touch

Twitter boss Dick Costolo and Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann had teased the release of the app just yesterday through a tweet that had a video playing in it. The video was short, and had audio. It is the first time we saw the company’s video on Twitter.

Earlier this month, Twitter had added a new service that allows you to make calls through your Twitter account. This marks the company’s entry into the growing list of social networking services that allow video and voice calls.

The new service is the first to use the new WebRTC standard that facilitates real-time communication in the Google Chrome browser using JavaScripts API. Essentially, Twelephone will facilitate real-time communication by using the microphone and camera feed directly from the user’s computer without the need for Flash.

Calls over Twelephone will be coming through an encrypted connection, thereby minimising security risks. Founder Chris Matthieu says that the P2P channel used by Twelephone can create data channels such as audio and video, instant messaging and file transfers securely.

WebRTC has been adopted by Chrome and is on its way for Firefox and Opera, with even Microsoft showing interest. Apple though has not mentioned if Safari will have WebRTC.

Matthieu told TechCrunch that he was planning to build something like Twelephone for over ten years, but didn’t want to use Flash for it. Instead, he used WebRTC for it. Twelephone has been built on NodeJS and is a single page application that also uses web sockets over a Chrome extension.

In a video demonstration, Matthieu showed exactly how easy it is to use Twelephone. The ‘Twelephone’ number or personal identity is your Twitter handle. You need to type in the handle in order to place a call. Once the call is being placed, you need to allow Chrome to access the camera and you can interact with people over Twitter.