Twitter-owned Vine introduces direct video messaging

4 Apr 2014

In what would look like a challenge to Snapchat and Instagram, Vine has introduced the ability for its users to send direct video messages to one another.

Making the announcement on its website, the Twitter-owned social media app will be directly challenging some of their competitors, who had also introduced direct video messaging to their users.

Unsurprisingly, the new ability lets users send video messages either directly to one person, or multiple people but, more importantly, a Vine user can send the video to anyone, even if the other person doesn’t have Vine on their phone.

A number of questions have been raised about Twitter’s intentions with Vine’s new direct messaging capability, as it is seen as a precursor to Twitter’s own attempts to introduce a cleaner feed with its own direct-messaging service.

Vine direct messaging

There have also been suggestions that the move to push individual messaging will give advertisers a more direct line of marketing as opposed to getting lost in the hum of activity from some of the app’s biggest users.

As a parent company, Twitter has been rolling out its own recent changes and has introduced emojis to users’ posts. The small digital icons have been used online for decades now but Twitter’s support handle @Support posted a tweet asking people to join the #emojiparty.

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Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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