Vine Gets Huge Update; Adds Key New Features

Vine, the popular six-second video app owned by Twitter, announced a major update to strike back against Instagram, which unveiled a video service at an event hosted by Facebook.

In a press release, Vine announced some amazing new features, including:

New Camera Tools: We’ve redesigned the camera and included new grid, focus, and ghost tools to make shooting great videos even easier.
Channels: We’re introducing 15 channels for you to submit posts to or browse from the Explore screen, including comedy, music and nature — each with their own theme and Popular feed. They’re a great way to highlight the awesome posts that are shared every day.
On The Rise: Discover new people who are starting to capture the attention and interest of the Vine community.
Revining: Share other people’s posts with your all of your followers in one tap.
Protected Posts: Most Vine posts are public, which means they can be viewed, discovered and shared by anyone on Vine. If you want more control over who can see your posts, you can now protect your posts, which means only the people you approve to follow you can see them. And of course, if you choose to share one of your protected posts to Twitter or Facebook, then it will also be viewable on the web.

Vine seems to be focusing on developing features that promote more innovative Vine videos, as opposed to making the service factor. Probably to combat Instagram Video, which announced their video service earlier this month and basically stole Vine from Twitter (that being said, Instagram did add their trademark filters for Instagram videos, and they’re 15 seconds long as opposed to 6, but those are the only major differences).

I’m guessing Twitter anticipated some competition/copying, so they probably have been prepping this update for quite some time, which explains how Vine was able to push out this update so quickly.