Twitter on Thursday launched Vine, a service that lets people share video snippets from iPhones or iPod touch devices.

Perpetually looping videos clips up to six seconds each can be shared using Vine or easily embedded in "tweets" fired off at the globally popular messaging service Twitter.

"Like tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine inspires creativity," Twitter vice president of product Michael Sippey said in a blog post.

A free Vine application became available worldwide at Apple's App Store on Thursday, according to Vine co-founder and general manager Dom Hofmann.

"Posts on Vine are about abbreviation -- shortened forms of something larger," Hofmann said in a blog post as the Vine website.

"They're little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life."

Twitter bought the small team at Vine, a startup based in New York, in October, prompting talk the messaging service intended to do for smartphone video what Instagram did for pictures.

Twitter in December added Instagram-style smartphone photo sharing features after the Facebook-owned service made it impossible for Internet users to integrate its images into tweets.

Previously, Instagram pictures shared in messages tweeted from smartphones could be viewed unaltered at Twitter.