Twitter seems to have a knack for taking after its competitors' websites. Just months after the social network switched to Facebook-esque profiles, Twitter-owned Vine launches a new site that looks similar to the world's biggest video-sharing website.
Vine, a one-year-old video-sharing mobile application that came to the Web only four months ago, is already giving its website a complete overhaul, with the aim of allowing anyone to watch Vine's six-second looping videos without being required to log in or create an account. Previously, access to Vine's videos was limited to users who had registered for a Vine account and are logged in to the website.
The new website takes after YouTube and now features a big search box, which viewers can use to discover and explore all the previously restrictive Vine has to offer. Users can search by people, tag or location. The revamped website also includes category channels, trending hashtags, user-owned playlists, "Popular Now" videos and videos hand-picked by Vine's editors.
Users can also watch videos in TV Mode, a feature that allows full-screen viewing of videos that play one after the other.
Last month, Vine also introduced a private messaging feature that allows users to share videos or text messages privately.
"Up until now, the primary way to watch, share and discover Vine videos has been on your phone. We've heard from the Vine community that you sometimes want to explore Vine and view videos on your computer too," writes Vine Web lead Janessa Det in a blog post.
The revamp seems to be in line with Vine as well as Twitter's efforts to amass a greater following. In August last year, Vine revealed that it has racked up 40 million registered users. To this day, however, Vine remains silent as to what portion of the 40 million users are actively using the website. By comparison, Facebook-owned Instagram, which is Vine's biggest competitor since it launched a 15-second video service in June, has 250 million users.
Following Twitter's first-quarter earnings report, investors have been greatly disappointed in the social network's declining user growth rate, although earnings beat analyst expectations and more than doubled since last year's first quarter. Twitter only added 14 million new users in January to March of this year, a 30% drop from the 19 million users it added in the same period of 2013.
The Web is making a great transition to mobile. However, desktop still seems to be alive as more than 500 million monthly views on YouTube, which made $1.96 billion in advertising revenue in 2013, come from desktop.
While Vine has yet to roll out an advertising platform, Twitter, its parent company, has already bought its own mobile ad network, and Vine's redesigned website can potentially play a big role in monetizing the video-sharing website.
