 Welcome to News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV for Wednesday, October 10th, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. If Twitter ends up running its own video service, this should help. The messaging service has bought Vine, a video-sharing startup. Also, Twitter's co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is rumored to have less responsibilities. Are either of these good moves for Twitter? Joining us with breaking analysis on these stories is SiliconANGLE News Desk editor, Kristen Nicole. Welcome, Kristen. Good morning. So, to start off, first, can you tell us what is Vine? It's a startup that hasn't quite launched to the public, but it basically centers around a video service that works with your mobile phone and it lets you take short video recordings like the Twitter for video. So we've heard about other video startups before. What is Vine doing that makes it unique from other video apps out on the market? Sure, there's been plenty of folks trying to do something similar for a few years now, and what Vine does differently is they take small segments, little clips, and kind of stitch them all together instead of taking one continuous clip or even taking photos and turning it into a video from there. Who are some of Vine's competitors, or who would Vine be able to stand out on its own against if Twitter hadn't purchased them? There's others like, video's one, Tout is another. Over the years, there have been some that have come and gone or been acquired. I think there was one called 12 Seconds, which really iterates what their service was really trying to do, accomplish. Even Seismic started out with a very video-centric approach to short burst social networking updates. And as we all know, Seismic evolved quite a bit from there and ended up being acquired by Hootsuite. Do we know why Twitter is interested in Vine over the other video sharing sites out there? One reason may be because it's a smaller startup with a relatively small team, it might have been available at a good price. There was some speculation that this was an acquire, meaning that they really wanted the development team and the founding team behind the product more so than the product itself. But there's also information coming out that Twitter may in fact be using the underlying technology to either roll out a video service, video hosting for their own purposes or just go ahead and launch Vine as a standalone service. Yeah, so there's a possibility that Vine could still live as a standalone service. What exactly does that mean? It means that it would still be Vine, it would have its own URL, it would have its own user base essentially, and it could still work in tandem with what Twitter's doing. They have a lot of partners now where they do video hosting, of course Twitter doesn't have video hosting for themselves, you can't upload a video directly to Twitter. You have to go through with their party. So maybe something similar to that where they're kind of buying their own partners or it could be something similar to what we've seen with Facebook and Instagram. Vine and Instagram is still called Instagram but it's kind of under the Facebook umbrella. So how is a video service like Vine going to help Twitter evolve? Well, the hosting aspect of it is really interesting here. Twitter's moved into the space for photos and videos and natural next step. So if they do launch it as its own standalone service then it could continue to evolve in that direction if they want to incorporate it for video hosting. That's going to be a really good next step for them as they try to improve the user experience with some of the media specific aspects for sharing. You mentioned earlier that the company has yet to launch publicly and that perhaps Twitter is interested because price might be low at this point. Is there any other reason why we may think Twitter is investing in a company that is not publicly launched? Well, there could be other reasons that they're just not revealing at this time. It looks like with some of the founding team members there's some networking that may be of importance in that regard. You don't always know these things. In a related story, Twitter co-founder and CEO of Square Jack Dorsey has been in the headlines. He's been highly admired and even referred to as this year's entrepreneurial golden boy. But earlier this year a business insider hinted that Dorsey was spending less time at Twitter. Can we speculate about his absence at all? There's certainly been some speculation about what's going on with Jack Dorsey. Some say that his leadership at Twitter has kind of faltered and he's remaining there for you know to still have an influence in product design but maybe not so much as a leadership role but then also he has Square, the mobile credit card dongle and that seems to be going really well. So there seems to be lots of speculation about his involvement with Twitter. Of course he was one of the early founders and there was some drama when he left and returned but he definitely seems to have a lot on his plate right now. Nick Bilton of the New York Times wrote Mr. Dorsey's role has since been reduced after employees complained that he was difficult to work with and repeatedly changed his mind about product directions. He no longer has anyone directly reporting to him although he is still involved in strategic decisions. So what can we make of all that? It really sounds like he's shifting into a figurehead role where his ideas on product design may still be helpful and influential. I know that Costello made an effort to bring Dorsey back into the fold and really have that team to be part of the face of Twitter and it doesn't hurt to have a golden boy on your team even if he's not necessarily doing a whole lot in meetings but really having that influence especially with the early ideas and possibly some of the business aspects and goals of where Twitter started. I'm sure it doesn't hurt to have him around. Recent leaks have hinted that Twitter revenue for forecasts are rosy and ahead of projections. Is that something that's unexpected? I wouldn't necessarily say it's unexpected. Twitter's been around for a little while now. They've had an ad platform for a couple years and it seems to be going pretty well. Expectations earlier this year put Twitter's revenue estimates at around $260 million so that's still small compared to companies like Google maybe even Facebook but it's good for Twitter especially as they continue to flesh out and seek that balance for a business model. Nick Bilton of the New York Times also mentioned that Twitter insiders have an IPO goal of 2014. At this point is Twitter IPO more of a fantasy than a reality? There's no telling what the team is looking to do but there's certainly some reports from Pundance saying that a Twitter IPO may not be in the cards right now. The market may be a little bit tired of the consumer facing web based products like Facebook and some of the others that have gone public in the past year or so so it would definitely be a huge consideration for Twitter to even think about going public in the near future. Well Kristen thanks so much for your time today we appreciate you joining us. Absolutely take care. 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