Facebook introduced video for its popular photo sharing application Instagram in an attempt to go to head-to-head with rival Twitter.

The world's No. 1 social network said on Thursday (June 20) its more than 130 million Instagram users can now record and post 15 second videos on the platform. The move takes aim at Twitter's Vine video platform that allows users to record and share six-second videos.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom were on hand to unveil the offering at Facebook's Menlo Park, California headquarters.

"Today we're gonna focus on Instagram. A little more than a year ago we ask this little team of about 12 people to join Facebook and at the time their community had about 20 million people and we saw what they were building was really beautiful and something that we thought would apply to everyone in the world and they were doing it in this way that was really unique to mobile devices .So fast forward a year later and we've more than tripled the size of the team working on this, the community is now more than 100 million active members and Kevin and Mike are now is the most influential leaders across all of Facebook and all of the products."

Among the features of Instagram video are a video stabilisation technology and spate of custom design filters.

Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in April 2012 as a way to keep its users hooked on new features weeks before the social media network became a publicly traded company.

Presented by Adam Justice

Read more: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/481605/20130621/facebook-instagram-video-twitter-vine.htm