The most famous short video sharing service, Vine, rose to fame when users could send quick videos and share it with the whole world. It was the idea of sharing short content with billions of users across the globe, that caught people’s eye. The service became popular specifically for funny 6-second long videos.
After Twitter acquired it in October 2012 for $30 million, the company got access to be shared over other social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. As of beginning 2016, Vine had over 200 million active users and there was enough content to counter the likes of Instagram and Snapchat.
Through a Medium post by Vine itself, the company confirmed that they will discontinue the mobile app. This essentially means that Vine will be closing down its business, but Twitter will continue to support the website and keep all the vines in place there.
The blog post mentioned, “We value you, your Vines, and are going to do this the right way. You’ll be able to access and download your Vines. 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. You will be notified before we make any changes to the app or website.”
Vine has been instrumental in making a lot of people famous, some of whom have started their ventures on YouTube and Facebook. The company also wrote that the changes will be done in the coming months and all creators as well as developers will be notified accordingly.
Since Vine tweeted about this change, the internet has gone completely crazy, and the tweet has already seen 8k re-tweets and 11k reactions in 11 hours. Vine has always been a standalone service with very few competitors and it has always been in the limelight for having special content.
We have some important news to share about Vine. Read more here: https://t.co/jPveGelXgS
— Vine (@vine) October 27, 2016
Why is Twitter being blamed for Vine’s closure?
Twitter purchased Vine in 2012, but never really worked very hard on changing it with the current times. Sure Vine is a completely different service, and the content is more of entertainment across different genres, but Twitter’s core policies never aligned with this company.
California-based Twitter’s ideologies are more about current and breaking news, or to be able to share news content with everyone around the world. For a simple fact that Twitter is one of the first sources of current events, speaks volumes about their objectives. There is nothing wrong in that.
Since the two companies had completely different set of objectives, Twitter never really invested much into this service. Vine’s co-founders quit early in 2013, which ended up giving a shaky start to the acquisition.
Moreover, a six-second video was not enough to relay news to users, and stretching that any further would not solve the purpose of a Vine. Because of all this, the company’s executives decided to close down the service, instead of continuing it without a mission.
It is unfortunate that users will not be able to create similar content in the future but we live in a world where such companies come and go, and maybe there is one that is being built right now which we have no idea about.
