Twitter-owned video sharing application Vine has raised its age rating from 12+ to 17+ following controversy surrounding pornographic clips shared widely on the service.

Vine is one of the hottest new video-sharing applications, and its quick rise in just a few weeks led to the ouster of rival app Viddy’s CEO. But Vine has had a problem with users submitting easily searchable clips of porn, which was highlighted when someone at Vine accidentally placed a hardcore porn clip to the top of every user’s feed. Twitter responded to that incident by making Vine porn harder to find.

But it looks like that wasn’t enough to please Twitter (and perhaps Apple, who has blocked certain iOS apps for making risqué images and videos available). Now Vine has been bumped up to a 17+ age rating, likely to make sure parents will know questionable content can be found on the service. When you download or update the app, it now warns that the app contains “age-restricted material” and says you need to be 17 or over to download it.

On top of bumping up the age rating, the latest Vine update adds sharing to Twitter or Facebook after you post to Vine. The update also lets users report or block an abusive profile and fixes bugs.

Check out some recent Vine videos below to get a feel for the uses of the service besides porn:

Time for a little Puppy Bowl action. vine.co/v/b106vu7w5jV

— Sean Ludwig (@seanludwig) February 4, 2013

Get off my pier. vine.co/v/bnB7WUW3XUv

— Buster Heine (@BST3R) February 4, 2013

Top image via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Thumbnail image of sexy couple via lenetstan/Shutterstock

Viddy CEO and cofounder Brett O’Brien has been ousted from his role as head of the company after losing much of its buzz to Twitter-owned Vine and reportedly turning down an insane buyout offer from Twitter.

First reported by PandoDaily, this story is a surprising and sad one. Video-sharing app Viddy attracted $30 million in funding in May because it had 30 million users and was growing quickly. By December, the service was still chugging along but with less momentum, so it finally released an Android app.

But the game for social video changed when Vine launched a few weeks ago. You use that service to share six seconds of video, and you can cleverly piece together these videos to tell stories or do other creative things. (I posted a Vine about the Puppy Bowl during the Super Bowl blackout last weekend.)

But Viddy could’ve potentially been where Vine is if it had accepted an offer from Twitter. PandoDaily reports that it was a “high eight- to low nine-figure acquisition offer.” Battery Ventures general partner and Viddy board member Brian O’Malley told Pando that that offer never happened.

But if the offer did happen, it’s a little crazy to consider that O’Brien turned that down, and a decline of that sort of offer could explain O’Brien’s ouster. Perhaps he thought Viddy was going to be the true “Instagram for video” app that would eventually own the landscape. Arguably, that title may now be Vine’s, but its porn problems could hurt that perception.

Now Viddy is left with “4 to 5 million uniques a month,” which is down from its high of more than 30 million, and facing strong competition from Vine. It will need to do some magic to return to the spotlight.

O’Malley indicated that version 2.0 of Viddy will launch in the next few weeks. Viddy also circulated a statement that it is conducting a search for a CEO.

But will that be enough to turn it around?

Twitter-owned video-sharing app Vine is taking steps to curb access to porn after it attracted a lot of unwanted criticism this morning for placing a hardcore porn video at the top of every user’s feed.

After a few hours with the video up and collecting a great deal of negative feedback, Vine removed the offending clip, and a Twitter spokesperson apologized for the “human error.”

“A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realizing this mistake, we removed the video immediately,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat earlier today. “We apologize to our users for the error.”

But now the service is doing more than just being more careful about its Editors Pick’s. Vine now blocks many searches for tags that might lead to pornographic videos, such as #porn, #boobs, #sex, and #booty. Searching for those terms brings nothing up inside the popular app.

While tags such as #nsfw and #pornvine are still searchable, it at least looks like Vine is beginning to take steps to make sure Apple doesn’t remove Vine from the App Store, like it did with 500px for pornographic images. Apple did, however, remove Vine from its list of Editor’s Picks today.

Vine was launched last week by Twitter and has attracted a lot of fans among the tech-enthusiast crowd. We’ll see if that enthusiasm holds up after this controversy.

Check out how some common Vine searches look now below:

Woman with eyes covered via MarcusVDT/Shutterstock