We’re speaking about Vine, a long-shuttered wonderland for memes and viral challenges from which sprung forth a cavalcade of strange stars like Logan Paul, Lele Pons and Shawn Mendes.
Vine was like TikTok earlier than TikTok, which itself was initially generally known as Musical.ly, however we digress.
So, is Mr Musk critical about resurrecting the app? Can he discover time to handle it between his roles at Tesla, SpaceX and X/Twitter? And, what precisely is Vine, anyway? Right here’s what you must know.
What’s Vine and when did it cease?
In a nutshell, Vine was a mobile-only app owned by Twitter that allow you to file and share six-second movies that performed on a loop.
Customers regularly posted pranks, dances, and memes that have been re-used and remixed endlessly. The app’s strict six-second restrict drew in a savvy, mobile-native crowd, whose fast considering and sharp enhancing abilities turned brevity into an artwork kind.
Their output was principally comedic, entertaining and irreverent: a teen enjoying flutes via his nostril, a healthful clip of rapper Drake and his mum courtside at an NBA recreation, Squidward hitting a dab on a parade float, and a refrain line of wildly gifted dancers.
As such, Vine epitomised the generational divide we frequently see on social media: youthful customers flocked to its snappy, artistic chaos, whereas older audiences have been left scratching their heads on the slew of in-jokes and GIF-like clips.
However, even for those who sat out the circus, you will have skilled Vine secondhand, via limitless compilation movies on YouTube, reposts on Twitter, or the occasional clip on Fb.
An Obama-era relic, Vine shot to 200 million customers by 2015, however its mercurial rise got here to an abrupt finish in 2017 after simply 4 whirlwind years.
The platform died as a result of it couldn’t present creators with a dependable method to generate income from their content material. This pushed lots of them emigrate to rival platforms like YouTube and Instagram looking for higher alternatives.
What has Elon Musk stated about Vine?
Mr Musk, who acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it to X, has repeatedly spoken about resurrecting Vine.
In April 2024, he performed a ballot asking X customers whether or not the platform ought to “carry again Vine”, which acquired over 450,000 responses, with 69.6 per cent voting in favor of the app’s return.
Extra just lately, in response to an X person’s publish suggesting “it’s time to carry again Vine”, Mr Musk stated: “We’re wanting into it.”
Whereas nothing is official but, it is clear to see how Vine may make a reappearance (although its success is one other query). Shortly after shutting it down in 2017, Twitter launched Vine Digital camera, a short-lived app that lets customers publish looping clips to Twitter or save them to their telephones.
Integrating it with X is smart, particularly for the reason that platform already helps livestreaming video and audio. That stated, Mr Musk and his group have promised to show X right into a super-app with options like funds, calling, relationship, and extra – however to date, most of that has not come to fruition.
It might solely take a number of seconds to look at a Vine, however reviving and restoring it to its former glory may take an entire lot longer. By which level, we’ll in all probability know whether or not TikTok is sticking round or going the way in which of the dodo (or ought to we are saying Byte).
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