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Vine, Twitter’s new short-video app, bad news for Viddy, Tout

Twitter has announced Vine, a new video app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that could spell trouble for other apps that describe themselves as the “Twitter of video.”

Vine allows users to create six-second videos that play in an endless loop similar to GIFs. You can see examples on Twitter’s blog.

“Like tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity,” Twitter said.

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Users can download the Vine app from the Apple App Store. It’s not necessary to have a Twitter account in order to use Vine, but Twitter says having one speeds up the process of signing up.

While Vine gives Twitters users a cool new toy to play with, it puts other companies in jeopardy.

In particular, Tout and Los Angeles-based Viddy are two apps that let users shoot 15-second videos.

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Though that’s not exactly the same premise as Vine, the two services might have trouble gaining new users while facing a competitor that’s backed by Twitter, which recently that it announced has more than 200 million monthly active users.

As for Android users, Twitter said it is working on bringing Vine to other platforms.

Click the Vine links in the Tweets below to see the videos in action.

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