Six Things You Didn't Know About Twitter's Vine App

Source: Vine

Vine app

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was reportedly heartbroken when Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion in cash and stock in April 2012. Less than a year and a reported $970 million later, Twitter bought Vine, a now-rising mobile application that's called the "Instagram for video."

Vine allows its more than 13 million users to share video clips of up to six seconds. The app, which is now available on iOS and Android devices, is used by news reporters, comedians and Twitter users that have more than just a picture to share.

Here are six things about Vine that most people don't know:

1) Vine, Twitter's video-sharing application, can be found online at Vine.co. When shared in a tweet, all clips post to Vine live at Vine.co, instead of Vine.com. Why? The latter domain name belongs to Amazon. Before Twitter acquired the Vine app, a source tells me Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann inquired about the Vine.com domain. The price tag? $500,000. Hoffman balked and purchased Vine.co, making way for Amazon's Quidsi network, which features category-specific retail sites, to purchase the Vine.com domain. Vine (the video app company) didn't respond when asked for comment.

Interestingly, according to web analytics site Alexa, traffic to Vine.com spiked upward in January 2013, the same month Twitter introduced Vine (and Vine.co) to the world. Vine.com would not say whether an uptick in visitors results in increased sales.

The Twitter account managed by the team at Vine is @vineapp, since @vine is taken by a user who checks into the social network intermittently. Vine owns VineApp.com, which directs visitors to the same homepage as Vine.co.

2) Why was the app named Vine? A source says it's short for Vignette, which is defined as "a short impressionistic scene." Vignette is also the name of a photo filter offered by the signature Twitter app.

3) Vine limits its videos to six seconds, but Twitter user Will Smidlein recently figured out how to upload a three-minute music video to a single Vine clip. On the same day Twitter released Vine on Android, Smidlein, also known as @ws on the micro-blogging site,exploited a hole in the video app's coding that allowed him to share the ever-viral "Rickroll" YouTube video in its entirety. The bug was later patched, but not before Smidlein says he "ruined some poor engineer's day."

4) Vine's logo connects the "V" and "I" in its name in the same way a vine loops and wraps itself around a tree. Even cooler, if you turn the

Vine logo upside down

, it displays the number of seconds your mini-video can be—"6."

5) Dorsey loves taking Vine selfies with his iPhone's front-facing camera. The tech guru, who one day hopes to be the mayor of New York, has posted dozens of Vines standing in front of various landmarks across the world. Recently, he scaled a San Francisco bridge to take an epic vine that would make even Godzilla jealous.

6) The Vine with the most likes belongs to actor and comedian Will Sasso. The clip, where Sasso attempts to sing but ends up spitting a whole lemon from his mouth, has more than 440,000 likes and has been tweeted nearly 29,000 times. Go Internet!

—Written by CNBC's Eli Langer. Follow him on Twitter at @EliLanger.