Vine updated their service today to afford us the luxury of sending short video messages directly to each other. The service has been made available for Vine users to send messages to non-Viners as well, but comes with a few security features and profile tweaks.
Your inbox will be separated into two categories: friends and other. Friends are for those you follow on Twitter, Vine, or are in your address book, while “other” is really just anyone else who sends a message. Profiles are also getting a color options.
To thwart odd messages or advertorial content being pushed to you, Vine ahs a few features implemented on launch. You can choose to have just your friends message you, which should take care of some strange, unknown folk sending you creepy video messages. If that’s not enough, you can still choose to block individual users from sending a direct video message.
Vine made a big splash on launch, but the form factor leaves many users wanting. Six seconds isn’t a long time, and for any kind of direct video message, it’s likely inadequate. We’ll see how this takes off, but we’re not holding our breath that this is the silver bullet for Vine. You can send video to those not using Vine, but that’s likely meant as a way to entice people to join. Socially, Vine also falls short. Sending a message to multiple recipients is available, but they’ll only see their response.
Source: Vine