We’ve seen for ourselves – and heard from parents, siblings and others – that kids love Vine. So, we built Vine Kids, a simple new app that gives young children a fun way to watch Vines.Image composite Vine, Marnie the Dog image: Mashable

Through adorable animated characters, kids can watch videos that are appropriate for a young audience. Swiping right or left shows a new Vine, and you can tap the screen to hear quirky sounds.

The idea came about during an office conversation in early January. One of my colleagues was talking about how much his two-year-old daughter loves Vine –– he said he wished there was a separate app she could use to more easily watch posts that are appropriate for kids. That week happened to be Hack Week, a time when we get to work on projects outside of our day-to-day work. So two folks teamed up and built exactly that. Here’s a Vine of my co-worker’s daughter using the app. How can you resist that smile?!

Vine Kids is available on iOS, and you can download it from the App Store. Enjoy!

Posted by Carolyn Penner (@cpen)
Head of Communications and Marketing

Thanks to you, Vine’s second year was incredible. The Vines you created and stories you shared brought us together more than ever this year. Though it’s impossible to capture everything that happened, we did our best to tell the story of year 2 though a playlist of some of our favorite moments.
Check it out here.

These Vines capture the breadth of emotion, activity and creativity we get to experience every day. From trends that originate on the platform and develop a life of their own to those that capture a unique perspective on events around the globe, you made great things and their impact was felt far outside of our app.

On top of creating and sharing, you guys watched a lot of Vines — like, literally more than 347,186,768,222 loops, and that’s just since we started counting in April, 2014.

We’d love for you to celebrate year 2 with us and recreate your favorite Vines from the last year using #VineYear2. Our birthday is January 24, and we’ll be sharing #VineYear2 posts during the week. 

As year 2 comes to a close, we want to thank you for sharing your life with us and helping make Vine what it is. We couldn’t be more excited for year 3.

Posted by Jason Mante (@jasonmante)
Head of Culture

We all have accounts that we love to follow and whose Vines we don’t like to miss. Now, you can select your favorite accounts to be sure you see Vines from them.

Simply tap the star in the top right corner of a user’s profile to make them a favorite.

You will receive a push notification and a notification in your Activity feed every time your favorites post a Vine. At any time, you can view all your favorites or update your notifications from Settings within the app.

We’ve been testing this feature at Vine, and it’s really helped us keep up with the people and Vines we care about most. We hope you like it too!

Posted by: Felix Fung, Your ‘Favorite’ Engineer

music by Us The Duo

Every day, millions of people open Vine to share memories in the moment. Today, Vine unlocks a new camera that gives you the freedom to create a Vine in any way you want. The new camera offers powerful ways to edit your videos as well as the ability to import existing videos on your phone and turn them into Vines. Simply put, this release gives you total creative freedom –– and it’s all within the app.

Here’s what’s new:

In addition to your phone’s front- and rear-facing cameras, you now have another source for your Vines: you can import existing videos from your phone. From the capture screen, you’ll see a new option in the bottom left corner that lets you import a video. You can select one video or mix together several — and yes, slow-motion videos are supported. 

Next, it’s now easier to get your Vine just the way you want it. Whether you’ve imported a past video or shot a new one within the Vine app, you can edit your Vines faster and with more precision. Simply tap the scissors from the preview screen to edit your Vine and try out new tools such as the duplicate button and mute button. My favorite new tool is the preview and undo button — with one tap, you can preview your last clip right from the capture screen, and if you don’t want to use it, you just tap the same button again to undo it. 

If you’re looking for even more ways to shoot great Vines, simply tap the wrench from the capture screen. This will let you access a second layer of camera tools: grid, plus a new level; the focus lock, which now works with the front-facing camera in addition to the rear-facing camera; ghost mode, which shows you the last frame of your previous shot (and is super helpful for lining up shots!); and a new torch feature, so you can now shoot in low-light settings.

When we introduced Vine, we wanted to make it easier for people to create, share and discover short, looping videos. Today, people enjoy Vines not only within our mobile apps, but also on vine.co, across the web through embedded Vines, and on services like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, every month more than 100 million people watch Vines across the web*, and there are more than 1 billion loops every day. As the community continues to grow and more and more people find and watch Vines every day, we are excited to provide people with more tools to express their creativity and make even more, and more awesome, Vines.

To give the new Vine camera a spin, download the latest version of Vine for iOS and Android.

Want to get in on the action? Find the oldest video on your phone and share it with #VintageVine. I’m excited to see what you all share.

Posted by Richard Plom

Vine iOS Engineer

*source: Google Analytics