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It's popular the same way Quora is:

1. People like Techcrunch are talking about it.

2. (...)

3. Success!

Step 1.5: Trendy SV/SF people starting tweeting and blogging about it.

I'd be curious to know what numerical value you attribute to success?

Here's an easy way to subjectively understand if something is popular: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23vine&src=typd

It's a relative term. Vine launched what, a week ago, and already all of us know about it.

That's a pretty loose definition of the term 'success'.

Everyone knowing about it is a big hurdle to get over towards real success, but it's not really success in itself.