In 2012, Twitter acquired Vine, an application that allowed users to record looping 6-second videos.
Elon Musk, the new CEO and owner of Twitter, is considering reviving Vine, a short-form video service that Twitter acquired and discontinued before TikTok popularised the style.
The potential return of Vine demonstrates the variety of product concepts, including outdated ones, that Musk is experimenting with during his first week as Twitter’s CEO.
Axios was the first to reveal that exploratory conversations regarding a potential Vine resuscitation are taking place within the social network, according to a Twitter employee. The individual who requested anonymity did not have permission to comment on the organization’s behalf.
It’s unclear how a Vine redesign and brand rebirth would fit in with other significant uncertainties surrounding Twitter, such as whether Musk will implement cost-cutting measures like mass layoffs or try to increase subscription revenue.
Musk tweeted more than 20 times over the course of the two days, primarily sending mixed messages about the direction he wants to take on Twitter and doing nothing to quell concerns that hate speech and misinformation will proliferate under stricter regulations.
In one of his tweets, he conducted a Vine poll, with approximately 70% of participants favoring its return.
A few once-well-known Vine stars seemed open to the app’s potential revival.
Musk was answered by Zach King using a heart-shaped emoji.
“Yes, please @elonmusk,” replied Lele Pons in response to Musk’s post. Do it!!!”
Musk also asked for suggestions on how to make a revived Vine superior to TikTok.
He replied to one of the most well-known YouTube creators, Jimmy Donaldson, often known as MrBeast, asking, “What could we do to make it better than TikTok?“.
Musk had asked for opinions on Twitter, and Donaldson had answered, writing: “If you did that and genuinely competed with TikTok that’d be hilarious.”
According to Axios, Musk wants a reboot that might be completed by the end of the year.
However, some claimed that since Twitter discontinued Vine in 2016, it wouldn’t necessarily be simple to bring it back.
Former Twitter employee Sara Beykpour, who worked on Vine, claimed that the original Vine software might be too outdated to be usable right now.
This code is at least six years old. It’s 10+ for some of it. You shouldn’t look there. Start anew if you want to bring Vine back, Beykpour suggested on Twitter.
According to CNBC, Twitter purchased Vine in 2012 for $30 million. Vine was an app that, like TikTok years later, allowed users to create brief videos—only 6 seconds in Vine’s case—and then have those movies play constantly on a loop in a feed with other videos.
The failure of Vine to gain traction led to Twitter shutting it down in 2016, which led Pornhub to make a satirical bid and one of Vine’s founders to express remorse over ever selling it.
Vine co-founder Rus Yusupov claimed on Twitter that Vine failed because it didn’t develop the necessary features in a timely manner, didn’t support creators’ ability to monetize their work, and did not adopt the practice of lip-sync videos the way TikTok has.
Reels, Instagram’s version of looping videos, was introduced in 2020 as a response to TikTok’s growing popularity.
