Mike Isaac

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Vine Drops a Few More Hints About Coming Features

With one day to go before Instagram’s big day, Vine is stepping up its publicity game — ever so subtly.

Dom Hoffman, co-founder of the Twitter-owned Vine video service, seems to be teasing a number of unreleased features for his app in a series of tweeted Vine videos. He’s joined by co-founder Rus Yusupov, who is also Vining the new features of Vine.

(How very meta of them.)

Mind you, this comes less than 24 hours before Instagram plans to debut a new video feature at Facebook headquarters, as we reported on Tuesday. Vine also thanked its 13-million-user community in a blog post on Tuesday, again telling the public that there are more features in the works.

So what is Vine teasing? Take a look at Hoffman’s first video:

I spot full-screen videos rather than the smaller box-like ratio we’re used to. There’s also text slapped inside some of the photos themselves, which is interesting (if not a nod to Snapchat’s text features).

Hoffman’s second Vine is even more interesting:

Considering the nature of the text, it looks like users are engaged in a back and forth conversation, a dialogue. Perhaps a hint of a private messaging feature to come? Users can send private messages on Twitter (and again, private videos on Snapchat), so perhaps Vine wants to incorporate that ability in its own app as well.

As for the part that says “cut by Tom,” your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps it has something to do with the last Vine, tweeted out by Yusupov:

Looks like he’s able to cut his clips apart, though it’s unclear just what exactly he’ll be able to do with them.

Spot anything I missed? Sound off in the comments below. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait and see what the Vine team has in store when the actual new version hits — ostensibly in the coming weeks.

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