The thing that makes Vine cool, that it showcases how bizarrely clever some people can be when their creativity is forced into constraints, is also what makes it intimidating. To produce a six-second video loop worth watching, a certain degree of forethought is required — perhaps too much for most of us.
That problem has been addressed with a new version of the iOS app released today. In the most significant change, users can now import videos already on their phones and turn them into Vine clips. Previously, the only way to make a vine was to shoot it from scratch within the app.
Basically, it means users can now use Vine the same way they do Instagram: shoot a bunch of videos they think are interesting, then figure out later what to do with them. The update also features a new batch of editing tools, including something called “ghost mode” and a simple preview-and-undo button.
This video doesn’t really explain anything, but it’s pretty.
On a smaller scale, Vine is grappling with much the same issue as its parent company, Twitter, which acquired it in October 2012, three months before it released any sort of product. In short, while the people use use it tend to love it, people who don’t are often confused about exactly what they’re supposed to use it for. Twitter has been trying all sorts of ways to make novices experiences more rewarding, including, most recently, showing them tweets from accounts they don’t personally follow.
Also like Twitter, Vine is trying to shift the conversation away from how many people are using its app to create loops to how many people are watching those loops, not just within the app but wherever they turn up around the web.
A year ago, the company announced it had hit 40 million registered users. It hasn’t updated that number, but in today’s blog post Vine revealed that more than 100 million people watch its clips every month, per Google Analytics, and there are more than 1 billion loops every day.