Giving them access to millions and millions of 6-second video clips seems like a pretty smart way to keep your kid occupied – you know, short attention spans and whatnot. But handing three-year-old Timmy your iPhone and cutting him loose on Vine proper is a decidedly bad idea.
Vine started blocking outright porn just weeks after its launch, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t R-rated content all over the app (and even the occasional x-rated stuff that just slips by).
With that in mind, Vine has just released a standalone app called Vine Kids. Basically, it’s a Vine-viewer app that lets kids swipe between curated Vine videos that are appropriate for their young, impressionable minds. The UI has been updated to make it more kid-friendly – quirky sounds play when you tap the screen and swipe between videos, for instance. According to Vine, it’s been designed for kids five and under.
Apparently, there’s a demand for this – at least inside the Vine office.
“The idea came about during an office conversation in early January. One of my colleagues was talking about how much his two-year-old daughter loves Vine –– he said he wished there was a separate app she could use to more easily watch posts that are appropriate for kids. That week happened to be Hack Week, a time when we get to work on projects outside of our day-to-day work. So two folks teamed up and built exactly that,” says Vine’s Communications and Marketing Head Carolyn Penner.
Vine Kids is only available on iOS for now, and you can download it today at the App Store.
