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Twitter’s Vine: How to get the most out of the new six-second video sharing app

On Thursday, Twitter unveiled its next step towards abbreviated world domination with its new app for uploading and sharing videos embedded in tweets, Vine. The app (currently available only for the iPhone) lets you record and post videos up to six seconds long directly to your Twitter account, and your followers can watch it right in the tweet.

In the blog post announcing the service, the Twitter team included some samples:

If a picture is worth 1000 words, it remains to be seen if a six-second video will be worth 140 characters, but chances are good that our Twitter feeds will soon be filled with brief vignettes of cats and goofy stunts.

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And if you’d like to get in on the action, you can start by downloading the Vine app from the App Store, then following these easy steps outlined by Mashable:

1. Sign in using either your Twitter or Email account.

2. If signing in using your Twitter account, agree to the prompt requesting access to it.

3. Fill in the sign-up information; if you’ve signed up via Twitter, it’ll automatically pull in your full name, profile picture and bio, which you can then tweak if you so choose.

4. Follow the tutorial for how to create your first Vine post.

5. Start filming your first video (Vineo?), and pay attention to the green timer bar that shows how much time you have left to film.

6. Add a caption or location information, opt to share it on Vine, Facebook or Twitter, and hit done!

Once you’ve started making Vine videos, you can scroll through all the ones you’ve created on your Timeline (similar to the Instagram interface), or see what others have done in the ‘Explore’ section. Vine lets you browse videos by people, topic or tags, or you can look through Editor’s Picks for top Vines or Popular Now for the most viewed ones.

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Because it’s a separate service to Twitter, you’ll need to add your friends individually. Vine lets you automatically pull in a list of your Twitter friends who are on Vine, then select which ones you’d like to add. There’s built-in integration with Facebook to let you pull in your friends from there, too, although at the time of writing, that option is being blocked by Facebook.

Whether you plan on using Vine to film tiny masterpieces or record the mundane details of your daily existence, hopefully it’ll be a welcome deviation from your regularly scheduled Twitter feed.

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