I had a similar conversation about this with a friend yesterday instead of comparing it to Instagram - he compared it to YouTube. I believe the difference betw

I had a similar conversation about this with a friend yesterday instead of comparing it to Instagram - he compared it to YouTube. I believe the difference between other apps etc is instead of capturing one continuous shot, Vine allows punctuated recording. In other words you can collate a selection of a few snips of video which Vine auto-generates into a longer combined version. Sure you can do this and upload this to YouTube etc but I haven't seen anyone execute that as well as the Vine team. However, for it to be successful Twitter (which acquired Vine before launch) doesn't need Vine to have users. What Twitter needs/wants with Vine is engagement on Twitter (it doesn't necessarily need engagement within Vine, if it does that a bonus) because if there's engagement brands will create Vine's - which Twitter can then monetize. Sure the app can share to Facebook too, but Twitter's goal with that is to grab your social graph (hence find your Facebook friends which has since been blocked) which then encourages users to "follow" each other on Twitter - again helping it to monetize with advertisers. Twitter could have done this through encouraging advertisers to create short video ads on YouTube etc instead of Vine but then there is no value for Twitter as they can't tell advertisers how many people saw the video organically or because of the ad. That's the real goal of Vine, users are just a "bonus".