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Vine website update makes it the YouTube of six-second videos

Vine website update makes it the YouTube of six-second videos

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Vine wants to give everyone in the world the ability to watch your six-second video masterpieces. So today, the company is drastically overhauling its website, and the result is something that's a bit closer to YouTube — in concept, anyway. The videos are obviously much shorter, and the site looks quite different. Before today, Vine's site only let registered users visit their own home feed or visit someone else's profile to see their Vine clips. That was a decent start, but now Vine is adding a slew of new features including playlists, featured videos, channels, trending tags, and a dedicated section for "popular now" videos. Random clips constantly play behind the site's search bar, so you can see Vines without even clicking on anything. Several of these features that improve discoverability have long existed on the Vine mobile app, but they're now being pushed to the web version.

Thankfully, an account is no longer required to browse through the best videos shared through Vine — a change clearly designed to boost the total number of eyeballs on the site. Much has been made of Twitter's perceived growth problem when compared against Facebook; Vine faces a similar struggle in trying to carve out its own spot in your list of favorite apps. It may never reach Instagram's level of popularity, but this expanded web push (along with other improvements like messaging) can't hurt Vine's chances.