Vine (service)

Founded in June 2012 by Rus Yusupov, Dom Hofmann and Colin Kroll,[1][2][3] the company was bought by Twitter, Inc., four months later for $30 million.

[10] Vine's co-founder Dom Hofmann created a successor not affiliated with Twitter,[11] which launched on January 24, 2020, as Byte; was renamed twice; and was discontinued on May 3, 2023.

Many monetary sources began to move to longer short video platforms, and with them followed many popular Vine creators.

Between January and June of 2016, more than half of Vine users with more than 15,000 followers ceased uploading or deleted their accounts to move on to other platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.

[26] Although the app still enabled users to record six-second videos, they could only be shared on Twitter or saved on a camera roll.

[10] The Verge reported that the closure of Vine led many of its most notable users, such as Kurtis Conner, David Dobrik, Danny Gonzalez, Drew Gooden, Liza Koshy, Shawn Mendes, Jake Paul, Logan Paul, and Lele Pons, to move to Youtube.

[31] In November 2018, co-founder Dom Hoffman announced the upcoming successor to Vine, Byte, also previously known as V2; it was slated to come out in spring 2019.

[34] An Axios article published on October 31, 2022, stated that Musk purportedly requested Twitter engineers work on rebooting Vine.

The camera would record only while the screen was being touched, enabling users to edit on the fly or create stop motion effects.

[41] Additional features were added to the app in July 2013; these included grid and ghost image tools for the camera, curated channels (including themed areas and trending topics/users), the ability to "revine" (share again, similar to Twitter's "retweet") videos on a personal stream, and protected posts.

[43] In June 2016, Vine announced that it was experimenting with letting users attach video clips up to 140 seconds.

[45] It was designed by a group of Vine employees in order to try to create a safer space for younger users to eventually watch content which was deemed appropriate for children.

[46] Vine attracted different types of uses, including short-form comedy and music performances,[47] video editing, and stop motion animation.

[48] On February 1, 2013, a Turkish journalist used Vine to document the aftermath of the 2013 United States embassy bombing in Ankara.

[52] Music-oriented videos also shared success on the service; in July 2013, a Vine post featuring a group of women twerking to the 2012 song "Don't Drop That Thun Thun" became popular, spawned response videos, and led the previously obscure song to peak at number 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

[56] Following the shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014, then-St Louis City Alderman Antonio French used Vine as a way to document the protests in Ferguson and the surrounding area.

These videos were among the earliest accounts of the racial tensions in Ferguson, and helped bring national attention to the situation.

[58] The vine quickly grew in popularity around the internet, even making an appearance inside an Ariana Grande video and many beauty articles, of them repeatedly using the phrase.

[63] A tribute was made to the video and created the hashtag "#okaymovement" containing many mash-ups, some linked to the song Mercy by Kanye West.

[65][66] A BBC review described collections of Vine videos as "mesmerizing", like "[watching a] bewildering carousel of six-second slices of ordinary life [roll] past.

"[48] An article by The New Yorker investigated the impact of online video platforms in creating a new generation of celebrities, stating: "A Vine's blink-quick transience, combined with its endless looping, simultaneously squeezes time and stretches it.

Cadbury UK had used their profile to show off new confectionaries that were in the making and created a contest around giving out samples to keep people coming back to the chocolate company.

[77] TikTok is similar to Vine in that it is a simple short video platform with the added option of Duet, meaning that two different TikTok creators may collaborate at different times to create a final video; The Verge called it "the closest thing we'll get to having Vine back".

Reports from early 2018 showed that Hofmann had already started reaching out to social media personalities in hopes to secure viral content for the new platform.

[81] On May 4, 2018, Hofmann announced on the V2 community forums website and the official Twitter account that the project had been postponed indefinitely.