Twitter has just leapfrogged everyone in the mobile, social video space with Vine, a video-sharing app that’s actually easy to use.

The company has introduced Vine, a new app that allows you to share six-second looping video creations with your friends on social networks. Vine also officially announced it has been acquired by Twitter, though it by no means is a Twitter-exclusive experience.

We took the app for a spin and found it incredibly simple and enjoyable to use. Instead of the standard video-sharing experience, you record videos by holding your finger on the screen. By lifting your finger, you can momentarily pause the recording, making it possible to create a miniature narrative out of multiple scenes. The app does all the stitching automatically for you, editing together a six-second movie with a series of jump cuts. The results often end up looking more like an animated GIF with audio than traditional, single-shot videos you see shared on apps like Viddy or Socialcam.

With the six-second limit and stop-and-go recording, Vine is the closest thing to an “Instagram for video” I’ve seen to date. It’s not about literally porting filters over to video, but rather making it simple to create entertaining clips. The mobile-only experience is about capturing very short, in-the-moment videos that require very little effort but can also be incredibly different from one another.

Though Vine is a Twitter-owned app, you don’t need a Twitter account to get started. And Vine can also connect to Facebook, allowing you to post videos there as well. When you first install the app, you have the option to sign in via Twitter or create a new account with an e-mail address.

Once you’re in the app, you see a home screen with a scrollable list of Vine creations. Assuming you don’t have any followers when you sign up, you’ll get a list of Editor’s Picks. You can also find other Vine videos through the Explore tab, which brings you lists of Editor’s Picks, Popular Now, All Posts, and various hashtags like #food, #howto, and #firstpost. Start poking around the Explore tab and you’ll find some pretty amazing Vine videos — everything from stop-motion animations to quick run-throughs of how to make coffee.

In its current state, Vine is definitely still buggy. No matter how many times I tried, I could not sign in with my Twitter account. The app consistently crashed as soon as I entered in my Twitter login and hit “authorize,” so I ended up needing to go the e-mail route. A few of my Wired colleagues, however, were able to sign in via Twitter without problem. Finding friends — which you can do by searching Twitter or your phone’s address book for matches — was also an issue for me, though other testers at Wired only saw an error message pop up once or twice and eventually had no problems finding friends through Twitter.

It’s clear that Vine’s unique recording process, and specific six-second time limitation, is what will spark creative videos. (But the app also won’t let you just post super short videos — you’ll need at least around 2.5 seconds before an upload icon appears.)

And when you’re scrolling through the app, videos automatically start looping once you get to them. There’s no need to tap to open a video, or press play. In this sense, it’s much more like scrolling through Instagram and taking quick glances at everything rather than having to commit a lot more time to watch videos. That’s the kind of low barrier to entry that video-sharing apps need.