Vine just became YouTube with its new redesign which means you can watch videos with no sign-in required so you don’t even have to be a user of the app. You know how Vice made watching long documentaries really awesome by creating interesting half hour docus, Vine is now like YouTube for extremely short, looping videos.
For those of you who don’t muck about with mobile apps and prefer watching stuff on your laptop or PC, the redesign to the web version of Vine is quite nice. A part of the interface has been sectioned off into 12 channels for videos about Animals, Art, Fashion, Comedy, News, Science & Tech, Sports, DIY and so on. You can click on any of these and get treated to a stream of 6-second clips uploaded by various users.
On the left side of the page, sitting below Channels is Popular Now which shows you the top videos others are watching. Then you have Trending Tags that displays the popular words which have been hashtagged in descriptions and clicking on any of these will take you to a stream of videos tagged in a like manner. The last option on the left side of the interface is a Playlists section which obviously leads to collections of Vine clips gathered together.
Twitter, Facebook and email sharing are built into the UI and there’s a search bar right at the top for letting you look for uploaded content using specific search terms. A full-screen TV Mode, featured videos, editor’s picks and curated content are also part of the revamp. Now it only remains to be seen whether Vine can become the alternative YouTube for impatient folks who can’t sit through long videos.