You No Longer Need a Vine Account to Browse Its Website

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By Kurt Wagner2014-05-01 19:25:48 UTC

Vine is giving its web version a much-needed makeover with new features including search, coming to the web on Thursday.

Visitors to Vine.co will now be able to watch Vine videos without creating or signing into an account, an element that the old site didn't offer. Users were greeted with a login page but didn't have access to videos unless they had that videos direct URL.

See also: 35 Ways Musicians and Music Brands Are Using Twitter's Vine App

Of course, no private Vine videos will be accessible without a login, and users cannot revine private posts, so they should never appear on the Vine.co home screen, according to a company spokesperson.

Vine also added a search tool for finding new content, a noticeably absent element of the previous site. The new website will include content sections like playlists, featured videos and "popular now" videos, so users may stumble across stuff they didn't know existed on the site.

Users can still utilize the "TV Mode" feature with all the new feeds. TV Mode is located in the upper-right hand corner of the screen, and plays videos fullscreen instead of just in the feed.

The Vine web version was first unveiled in January, but without a search element, the service lacked a lot of what makes Vine useful on mobile. Adding content to the home screen without requiring a login should help expand Vine's audience as new users discover Vine — without the commitment of signing up ahead of time.

Vine does not share its total user base, but its parent company, Twitter, recently announced 255 million monthly active users during the company's Q1 earnings call earlier this week. Growth has been a point of emphasis for Twitter since gong public in November.

Following smaller than expected growth in Q4 2013, Twitter stock dipped more than 20% in after hours trading following the company's earnings report, and investor response to Q1 earnings weren't much better.

While Vine continues to be a "mobile-first" experience for users, the addition of more tools on the web can't hurt. If Vine is able to entice a few new users with the changes — or appease existing users who wanted a comparable web and mobile experience — then it's well worth the effort.

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Topics: search, Social Media, Twitter, Video, Vine