Vine, Twitter’s six second video platform, has expanded into mobile messaging as the trend for chat apps such as WhatsApp and SnapChat continues to grow.
The social network will be adding a messaging component to combine its core feature with regular messaging.
The name Vine are giving this feature is ‘Vine message’ or ‘VM’ for short.
Unlike most other messaging platforms that require you to have an account such as Facebook, Vine messages can be sent to non-Vine users as a video message to anyone in their contacts.
Group messaging is not possible at the moment but it is something they are working on.
Vine product manger Jason Toff explained the move in a blog: “From Vine’s early days, we recognized that there was a growing desire and need for private messaging on Vine. We’ve watched the community come up with some clever ways to send videos to their friends as we’ve been working on this solution. Now you can privately send Vine videos and text messages to your friends. You can even send videos to anyone in your address book, even if they aren’t on Vine.”
Mobile messaging is a fast-growing space. Facebook is paying $19 billion to buy WhatsApp, which is also reportedly preparing to add video calls. WhatsApp recently told the world via Twitter that it had a record-breaking day, handling 64 billion messages in just 24 hours.
new daily record: 20B messages sent (inbound) and 44B messages received (outbound) by our users = 64B messages handled in just 24 hours.
— WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) April 2, 2014