In an unfortunate turn of events, Twitter has announced the unruly demise of its 6.5-second looping video sharing platform ‘Vine’, which it acquired back in 2012. What was once considered as a tough competitor to up and coming services like Snapchat has now killed at the hands of Twitter! This is a sad ending for a capable platform!
Just hours after posting its positive quarterly results, the company broke the news of the discontinuation of the Vine mobile app ”in the coming months”. It further stated that it is not pulling the rug from under our feet right away and the website and apps will continue to remain online for the time being. The company will give all users and ‘Viners’ the chance to download their Vine videos before the official closure.
Though the mobile app is definitely going away, Vine is planning to keep the website online indefinitely. The online platform will continue to act as the content repository and enable you to watch all the incredible Vines that have already been made. Ah, so I won’t need to turn to YouTube compilations to watch the rise of Shawn Mendes from a Vine Star to his current stardom.
In what can only be termed as heart-breaking , the team shared their final goodbyes and Thank You’s in a Medium blog post. It is a hard pill to swallow but the one app whose compilations brought joy and fun back to our lives is no more.
Thank you. Thank you. To all the creators out there — thank you for taking a chance on this app back in the day. To the many team members over the years who made this what it was — thank you for your contributions. And of course, thank you to all of those who came to watch and laugh every day,
read the final blog post.
Well, that’s the only amount of information the company has decided to dispense this very moment. There is the lack of the reason behind this drastic decision, but one can easily make the guess — Jack Dorsey. The company also did not focus much on the growth and improvement of this platform since its launch in January 2013.
Even though Vine became one of the hottest apps of its time, the company still kept it at arm’s length and only interconnected the two services — loop count in profiles and native support. This negligence also led to the departure of not only Vine founder Rus Yusupov, but also its general manager Jason Toff oh-so-very recently. In short, Twitter utilized the capabilities of Vine.
Vine founder Rus was also blindsided by the news of the shuttering of the platform. He took to Twitter to share his view on the same, make a snarky remark against Twitter and offer some words of wisdom to young founder:
Don’t sell your company!
— Rus (@rus) October 27, 2016
After failing to get acquired yet again, Twitter is finally changing its ways of operation. It is probably closing Vine to direct its resources and focus on the live video streaming platform ‘Periscope’. The company is currently mapping out it’s video strategy while making a serious dent in the online live streaming ecosystem. It has already partnered with the NBA, NHL, Bloomberg and Buzzfeed and is now also looking to India for IPL streaming.
We cannot say if this is the end for Vine or not, but we’d love to see it make a bombastic return. #LongLiveVine
