Twitter owner Elon Musk is interested in reviving Vine, the social video app the platform gave up on six years ago and it is also the app that encouraged the trend of seconds-long videos. He has tweeted a yes/no poll to his 112.4 million followers: “Bring back Vine?”
Twitter closed down the looping-video app in 2016 after acquiring it four years earlier, leaving loyal Vine fans surprised. The company then reportedly tried to sell Vine shortly after. The six-second video app spawned a number of stars, perhaps the most notable is Shawn Mendes. The app also helped add audio and visual snippets to an otherwise text-heavy platform. The problem with Vines was it never developed as quickly as Instagram made its push into videos. Vine was co-founded by Rus Yusupov and it was sold to Twitter in 2012.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk is looking at ways to improve Twitter. He reportedly told his team of engineers to look at Vine’s code to figure out how much work it would take to revive it. According to Axios, which first reported the news, the reboot could be ready by the end of the year. That’s a really short timeframe to revive a five-year-old app while some of the code is over 10 years old, according to a tweet from former Twitter product director Sara Beykpour: “This code is 6+ years old. Some of it is 10+. You don’t want to look there. If you want to revive Vine, you should start over.”
If Vine makes a comeback, it needs to be something completely different as the youth are now on TikTok, which is being copied by every other social media company. One option, as The Verge points out, is that Vine may become part of Twitter itself instead of a separate app like it was originally.
The area in which Twitter employees are currently busy with is implementing a programme that would force a monthly fee (could be $8) for blue checkmarks by November 7.