Vine was a camera application that allowed users to record six second video clips that would continuously loop. The app, founded in June 2012 by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll, was bought by twitter for $30 million in October 2012 due to the team struggling to grow their base and make a profit, and stayed that way for the remainder of its life.
As many of us know, in October of 2016, twitter had announced that it would be shutting down the app “Vine” within the next few months, and it did. On January 17th 2017, the app was renamed to “Vine camera”, which resulted in a switch from a social media platform to more of a photography platform. The article “Twitter is officially shutting down Vine today”, states that “Many longtime Vine users were upset when Twitter announced plans to shutter the original Vine, with many of them venting their frustration on social media” (Huddleston). Co founder Rus Yusupov was also upset that Twitter had planned to end vine and tweeted: “Don’t sell your company!” (Heine). From this, we can infer that even though vine was only around for 4 short years, many people became very involved with the platform and was very sad to see it go…
The article “Twitter Just Shut Down Vine 4 years After Buying It For $30 Million,” included a tweet from Twitter that said: “We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made.” (Heine). However, only 15 months after the end of Vine, the site called “the Vine Archive” was shut down. Twitter states: “We moved the Vine Archive into a more static archived state to allow us to better preserve the public, creative expression of the vine community” (Twitter help). After this it was unsure if Vine was really over, but little did people know, it wasn’t.
In November 2018, “Dom Hofmann, co-founder of the six-second video platform, took to Twitter on Thursday to promote the launch of Byte, that is expected to debut in the Spring 2019” (Al-Heetl). That same day, a different article stated that, “Set for a July 2019 release, Byte is currently in private beta for iPhone and an Android version will come later this year” (Lamont). Now it is November 2019, and Byte has yet to have been released. Even after all of the excitement, the Byte website turned out just to be a mailing list option.
Why does Twitter keep announcing new versions of Vine if it doesn’t ever seem to happen? Will it ever happen? Only the future will know.
I love that you talked about Vine, not many people understand that a lot of celebrities today started on this app. David Dobrik for example has an entire “Vlog Squad” who started out on vine and now are making a living on youtube. Weird to hear that twitter bought vine just to shut it down.