Big Vine Update Includes Re-Vining, Protected Posts, Improved Camera & More

Vine has started to rollout several of its promised upgrades as it finds itself in a battle with Instagram for social video supremacy. It’s also introduced a new word into the lexicon: revining, which is explained below.

At least a couple of the new features could help increase visibility for both Vine users and their best videos.

Today’s update includes these five items, as explained on Vine’s blog post:

• 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.
• 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

Yep. A new word to know in the social video space.

The “revining” feature is interesting. It functions just like retweets on Twitter. You’ll start to see videos from users that you don’t follow if they’re “revined” by people that you do follow. That could open the door to growing your audience on Vine if your videos are revined regularly. It could also cost you followers if they don’t like the videos that you revine.

As you can see at right, each revined video is marked with who revined it. And there’s also an indicator further down showing how many times the video was revined. That’s clickable to see a list of who did the revining.

Other Features

The new “On The Rise” feature is next to the “Popular Now” button on the Explore page and offers another opportunity for more exposure, as does the Channels option. Vine has already offered channels on the Explore page, but what’s new is the option to submit your video to one of them from the Share screen.

This round of updates is available now on iOS. Vine says Protected Posts will be added to its Android app later today, and the rest of the updates will reach Android next week.

Vine also says more new features are on the way. It’s under some pressure to maintain the momentum that it built since launching early this year. Facebook recently added video to its Instagram service, and that made a hefty cut into the number of Vines that are being shared on Twitter.