Vine: May it Live on Forever
By Consider The Consumer on 01/17/2017
Waking up this morning, you may have felt a disturbance in the force. Before logging onto social media and “going live” on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, wishing your 3 followers a good morning, what you may not have realized was that the once great, popular, Vine app had died.
You may have read that it is being redone as a new app, but let’s be real, it is nearly impossible to make a hit that immense on the internet, I’d be willing to bet completely against the success of its followup.
Sadly, we must accept the fact that our “vine stars” and days of “doing it for the vine” are now over. In honor of this once monstrous application, however, we look back at its graceful fall from the top.
Below, The Consumerist gives us a timeline of its short, but sweet, life:
June 2012: Vine is founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll in Florida.
“It was surprising,” Hofmann told The Verge of the way people were encouraged to put the app to strange uses almost immediately. “Our original beta had something like 10 or 15 people on it, and even with that small group we started to see experimentation pretty early on.”
October 2012: Amid rumors that Twitter wanted to launch its own video service, the social media company bought Vine, AllThingsD reported on Oct. 9, 2012, for a reported $30 million.
Jan. 24, 2013: Twitter launches Vine as a free app for iOS devices.
“Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity,” explained Twitter’s VP of products at the time, Michael Sippey, in a blog post. “Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.”
Jan. 28, 2013: Only a few days into its life, Vine contracts a bit of a pornography problem, as Consumerist reported then.
March 2013: A few short months later, Vine bans porn and most nudity on the platform in an attempt to address the aforementioned porn issue.
April 9, 2013: Vine becomes the most-downloaded app on iOS, according to co-founder Yusupov, who celebrated the milestone on Twitter.
June 2, 2013: Vine becomes available on Android. Later that month, Wired noted that the Boston Marathon was a defining moment for Vine, after a Vine video of the explosion went viral. Founder Hofmann also explained that the brevity of each clip made them easier to share on social media.
“It began with unlimited time,” he said of the first version of the app. “But when we saw our friends trying to share their videos over text message, we realized that it needed a social component—and that meant we needed to make it quick to share and view.”
May 1, 2014: Vine launches a website version of the video service, allowing anyone with access to the internet to view clips.
July 2014: Vine introduces “loop counts,” which means everyone knows how many time a clip has been looped. And how popular you rae.
August 2015: Vine Music debuts, allowing users to create infinite loops of music. That same month, the company announced that it serves more than 100 million people every month, delivering more than 1.5 billion loops per day, Quartz reported at the time.
Oct. 27, 2016: The end arrived suddenly, with Vine announcing that Twitter would be discontinuing the mobile app.
November 2016: Rumors that Twitter might sell Vine for cheap instead of closing it down abound.
Dec. 16, 2016: Vine announces that the app will be replaced by will be replaced by the Vine Camera app, which will connect to Twitter instead of having its own social network as of Jan. 17, 2017.
Jan. 17, 2017: This brings us to today, when the mobile app official becomes the Vine camera. All old videos will be archived and browsable on the Vine website, however, so you’ll never have to go without.
Vine will be missed, and it will be missed for all of the right reasons. Its complete randomness, its lack of routine; absolutely everything about it didn’t make sense. It produced 6 second clips that enthralled us for hours on end, and we never even questioned it.
Vine was the people’s app. You didn’t have to be famous to have your voice heard your stupid video seen. If it made one person laugh, chances are it made others do the same.
RIP in peace, you marvelous bastard.
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