Born from mobile, Vine migrates to Web

Like its parent Twitter, Vine makes an art form from the shortest possible expressive burst. Vine’s 6-second looping videos are tailored to take advantage of the short attention span and limited bandwidth of mobile sector, but now the company is going beyond its original mobile platform to beefing up its Web presence with full profiles.

The profiles, first announced last year, enable users to watch videos, look at earlier videos posted by others, and like/favorite/revine/share/comment. Previously, it was feasible to find other Vines only through the mobile app.

The profiles, which you can share with others who might want to see your videos, are intended for playback mode, not for creating more videos on the Web-browsing device you’re using. A new playback mode is the fullscreen, Web-only TV Mode, showing a complete collection of videos in sequence.

Vines, tweets, and other such micro-expressiveness work as short bites, but these are also popular as compilations on YouTube or elsewhere. The new Web profiles will make it easer to find all the Vines of a given user, but one can expect to see more tools for curating, reacting to and sharing compilations in the Web incarnation.

On its blog announcement, the company noted that this “is just a first step toward bringing you a richer, more enjoyable web experience,” with more improvements coming this year.