The purpose of VineViewer was simple: enabling people to search for Vines on the web.

Twitter’s Vine app fostered a new form of creativity, but it was mainly trapped on the iPhone. VineViewer provided a service that didn’t exist anywhere else and that Twitter and the Vine service were not fulfilling.

The technology is a website constructed as a modular Twitter search API interface with a focus on Vine videos. The majority of code is static HTML/CSS and JavaScript to allow for fast, decentralized delivery. Server side PHP exists only to cache Twitter API calls and provide short URL resolution. The web client performs search API requests through JavaScript against the proxy server and exposes a subset of results, allowing for endless scrolling through available content.

The search API is controlled by Twitter and the video content is served by Twitter's Vine service. Open source JavaScript libraries such as jQuery are used. Otherwise, all other code was specifically constructed for the site and can run on any typical LAMP environment.

The web app doesn't unnecessarily abstract the Twitter API and performs most of the work on the client side for the best performance, as well as not unduly burdening the Twitter or Vine services. This allows for many elements to be served off a CDN or substituted without requiring significant changes. We're able to accomplish a great deal with very little.

Our Labs team developed and controls the technology for this application, and the application was funded internally. Future development will go beyond event-specific and brand-sponsored themes, and explore user-directed experiences, such as create-a-playlist and Vine mixes. We continue to seek new opportunities to leverage the web app as a new form of storytelling and discovery.

Since the day it launched, VineViewer has drawn attention from social media, creative and technology enthusiasts. Fast Company was the first to break the app's story. Since then, Creativity, Agency Spy and Ad Age have all featured VineViewer, covering both the web app and its extensions to industry events and engagements.

VW’s interest in leveraging VineViewer to engage automotive fans around the New York International Auto Show was a notable milestone, as well, and demonstrated that clients can put VineViewer to work to amplify products and offerings. The ad trades took notice as well, and Adweek named VW an innovative marketer for putting the app to use during the New York auto show.

And visitors to VineViewer seem pretty happy, too – they spend an average of 3 minutes browsing the site, all the more significant considering the 6-second length of a Vine video. Other agencies are now using VineViewer to track and measure the success of their own Vine campaigns, and we're continuing to customize, expand and optimize the app to our clients' needs.