“Ok Facebook. We’ll see your Instagram acquisition and raise you a video sharing service.”

Today, Twitter announced a new mobile service called Vine that lets you create a share “beautiful, short looping videos.” The key to the service is abbreviation – “Vines” are the shortened form of something longer. Like animated GIFs, Vine lets you share moving scenes and come with sound, and have a six-second maximum length.

Unlike Instagram, this service is completely supported by Twitter, allowing for the cards that let you view the media within the tweet. (Twitter disabled full Instagram integration a little over a month ago.) Vine is also meant to be embedded anywhere besides Twitter.

\"Vine is the most exciting thing I've seen in a while,\" tweeted Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey shortly after the company announced Vine's debut. \"Not just because of the team, because it brings an entirely new art form to the world.\"

Examples of Vine via Twitter and Vine blogs

Twitter acquired Vine in October last year and officially rolled out the service today. It is available for free worldwide on the iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store.

This isn’t the first attempt for a company to try and launch “the video Instagram.” Tout is a service that calls itself a “Twitter for video,” allowing users to shoot videos of up to 15 seconds long and then embed them in tweets, Facebook posts, blogs or elsewhere. Viddy and Cinemagram are other video sharing services that allow users to animate and share small sections of video clips.

\"Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity,\" Michael Sippey, Twitter's vice president of product, wrote. \"Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.\"

Check out my very first Vine! http://vine.co/v/b5HVATHWahm