There's a lot of good and bad sounds and images that can be stuffed into six seconds of video, and because those video slices can prove enticing and delectable to young minds, Vine is debuting a special service that lets kids safely enjoy video clips without any potential harm.
Twitter's Vine Kids, an app available on iOS, curates content so kids are only exposed to warm and fuzzy video bits.
"We've seen for ourselves - and heard from parents, siblings and others - that kids love Vine," says Carolyn Penner, Vine's head of communication and marketing. "So, we built Vine Kids, a simple new app that gives young children a fun way to watch Vines."
Penner says the idea came from a colleague, Andre Sala, who lamented the fact that kids couldn't safely enjoy the odd and wonderful fruits that are grown on Vine's feeds. Sala was at the office talking about how much his two-year-old daughter loves Vine, but he wished there were kid-appropriate feeds on the service.
The week the conversation took place was Hack Week, a time at which Vine employees got a chance to explore their passion projects.
"That week happened to be Hack Week, a time when we get to work on projects outside of our day-to-day work," says Penner. "So two folks teamed up and built exactly that."
Vine has been a key component of Twitter since the social media network acquired the video platform in 2012. While Twitter has held onto the service and leaned on it for video, the social networking site has branched out from Vine's six-second video to release more robust tools for the Twitter app.
Just a few days before the Vine division released Vine Kids, Twitter unveiled the camera component of its app. Back in November of 2014, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed his company wanted to expand the social network's messaging tools and facilitate the dissemination of more robust video.
On Jan. 27, 2014, Twitter released the video capture and editing tools for its app. Users of the app's camera feature can capture video, which is split up into 30 second clips.
From there, users can weed out the bad clips and sort the good bits before posting the video directly to Twitter. The video can be posted directly to a public feed or embedded in direct messages.
