Never used Vine, and the videos from it never worked on my browser, but this is truly shocking. Like, Google Reader shutdown level shocking. Twitter is seriously clueless if they weren't able to make any use of such a popular service. Especially when Periscope is still running somehow. Though it's only a matter of time for that too now.
Periscope may stick around for a while only because of the current obsession with live video. As soon as Facebook gives up on live (or at least stops focusing so much on it), Twitter will follow suit and fold up Periscope. If I were an engineer on that team, I'd do some proactive job hunting.
I seriously doubt this will happen. From personal experience, I see more and more people using live on Fb & Twitter, it's even starting to engage the older generations. And from a big picture perspective, video, and motion formats in general, are definitely the future.
Looks pretty clear that Facebook and Twitter are all-in on live video for the medium to long term. Twitter even has live broadcasting deals with NFL, MLB and NBA.
I'm not sure that translates to full support for any random twitter user to be doing 'live' broadcasts. It may not be a huge impact on the infrastructure, but when cost-cutting comes up again, unless they're monetizing it somehow, I'd expect "random joe live-video broadcasting" to be on the chopping block.
MLB? NFL? NBA? I'm sure money's being exchanged to make it worthwhile to handle that.
For an engineer not to be actively looking, you have to believe that Twitter will be around for the foreseeable future. That seems like a sucker's bet, to me.
It all comes down to the engagement metrics. Facebook and Twitter will stick with live video as long as people keep watching. Same reason Twitter pulled Periscope viewing in to the main app - helps them pump up the numbers.
A majority of the Vine content I watched was compilations people made on YouTube, and a lot of those compilations have moved on from Vine, to Instagram and Snapchat.
I'm not suggesting Vine was superseded per se, as its users were generating a ton of content even to this moment, but at least from my perspective it seems its main users have had suitable alternatives available to them for a while.
Yeah - YouTube wins because it directly generates income for creators, Snapchat wins because it's access to a different demographic in a unique way, Vine had great momentum and made creation easy, but never had a particularly strong USP so there's little loyalty to it as it's own platform for creators to drive traffic to.
At this point Vine isn't really all that unique anymore. Facebook, instagram, snapchat and twitter all do what it did. I'm not very surprised by this at all.
That's funny, I've always had the same experience with Vine--website always took a long time to load, then videos would hiccup a lot, if they loaded at all.
Vine's limitations held it back. Square video and 6 seconds does not a good video app make. In order to appeal to businesses that would actually pay for video (ad agencies, news) they'd have to completely remake the app to account for different aspect ratios and videos longer than 6 seconds.
When twitter.com already has videos that support those features why keep an antiquated app around?
Too little, too late. I open the app about once every 1-2 months. I never knew about the "watch more" feature. At that point it's just like any other video app, begging the question of, "why use Vine"?
To describe Vine and Periscope as "the same" because they are both "video apps" is like saying blueberries and a potato salad are the same because they're both food.
I had bought some Twitter stock earlier this year, and immediately sold it when the buyout rumors started because I knew it wouldn't get a bid higher than that with Jack at the helm.
It is dismal that they walked into meetings with Google, Salesforce, Disney, etc and they turned up their nose. Truly telling.
I've been a very harsh critic of Twitter's leadership, especially Jack Dorsey for a while now. Think of this scenario, the NFL just signed a distribution deal with the NFL, something they will probably lose money on. However, the NFL just released new social media rules barring gifs and replays until after the game. How did Twitter's leadership not put this together? You already have an existing relationship and leverage with the NFL.
You could have easily managed to make replays exclusive to Vine. That's exactly what Vine is good for. Imagine NFL teams having to post your social network on every other social network so people could watch replays? No one cares about Thursday Night Football, it's a garbage schedule with low ratings. The money was with the replays, and they completely missed the boat on leveraging their platform with the NFL's new rules.
That's just one example of total incompetence. Twitter is lucky that it is now a backbone to journalism more so than Facebook, if that ever gives way...watch out.
Vine is a cultural unicorn that no one expected. The founder will be able to make another $30 million, but he will never be able to create something as impactful as it again.
Was Vine really that impactful? I only ever encountered a handful of links to content on Vine, and when the videos would play at all, they were typically just 20-second-long clips of something mildly amusing at best, totally disgusting at worst.
As far as the social goes, I've literally never heard someone say "check out my Vine" or "look me up on Vine" the way I hear it about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. (and used to hear about MySpace, LiveJournal, etc.…).
I'm genuinely curious: was Vine something big and impactful that I somehow managed to sidestep? Or were my experiences with the service typical?
Vine was very impactful on the members of the Vine community. Yes, outside of Vine you didn’t see much links to it, but once you entered the community it felt very personal. Maybe exactly because it was its own little place mostly sealed off from the web. There were real, caring relationships between creators and viewers. People were generally very upbeat and encouraging. Creators showed intimate moments of their lives, often non-flattering, because you were allowed to be vulnerable. You were encouraged to experiment and to express yourself.
That created a bond between content creators and viewers, and between creators and creators. Some creators became friends and moved in together. I really liked the intimate, unglamorous moments that were shared. I think viewers could relate to the creators and felt more content about their own lives because they saw that all others had similar lives. Vine created happiness.
In contrast, on Instagram everyone tries to show off great locations, their perfectly decorated meal, their toned bodies, their perfect lives. It is more about showing off than creating a deep, personal connection.
You don't live in the social/cultural circles where Vine is important and compelling and novel.
You are also completely discounting shortform video. The format hasn't really existed before in this way and there's an explosion of creative experimentation happening within it. Snapchat, Instagram, and Vine are all helping fuel it.
I can't really speak to it's exact origins but Vine was a major player in launching short-form video comedy.
Doesn't Twitter do the same thing as Vine now that Twitter does videos? I never got into Vine, but kind of assumed this would happen when Twitter bought Vine. Selling Vine outright would perhaps cause people to move to the new Vine instead of Twitter video, so this (to me) would seem like the best bet to keep Vine's users and migrate them to Twitter.
They should have integrated these things better though. Instagram photos are so tightly coupled with Facebook (basically cross-posts), meanwhile Periscope, Vine, etc are apparently external cards in Twitter. Consider that in Twitter you can actually tag a person in a photo but can you get a gallery of photos with that tag? I dunno. Easy wins that have been neglected by Twitter for a while.
If that's the reason, it just seems so... destructive to me. This is something I respect about Facebook: they are willing to cannibalize their own products (e.g. instagram vs facebook, whatsapp vs fb messenger) because they realize how mercurial and segmented internet users can be.
Vine's primary differentiating factor was 6 second looping videos. While the Twitter platform certainly supports video, it doesn't have the kind of automatic, looping, addictive format that Vine was good for.
I think the issue might be that Boomerang has taken on Vine's role here, and is more suited on the back of close Instagram/Facebook integration, whereas Vine is quite separate from Twitter.
Focusing on getting something like this into Twitter itself might be a better bet (though I suspect Facebook has it wrapped up for now).
I think before kill vine, they could have used to test new discovery/search options that could end up in periscope and twitter. 5 millions people using daily is a great base to do that.
That's fucking stupid. I wasn't crazy about Vine but Twitter was first to market with a brandable property taht quickly became A Thing. It was the one innovative thing to come out of Twitter in the last few years, and now they're shutting it down. If I had any Twitter stock I would dump it all on this news.
Well, first of all, Twitter bought Vine. So they did no innovation on that front. Secondly, I think it makes sense from a business standpoint for Twitter because they've incorporated it into Twitter, and they NEED to start making a profit and this will help. Twitter stock may actually rise a bit due to this news.
I'm not worried about that, I meant in the sense of putting out something innovative under their banner. The consumer is indifferent to whether something was developed in-house or acquired, but is not indifferent to whether a firm is regularly putting out new things or just being the same old same old. And Twitter has just been the same old for a really long time now. The only interesting thing on Twitter in the last year has been Donald Trump's warped personality :-/
Twitter has a unique position as a key point in culture and media. It's played key roles in BLM and the Arab Spring. It astounds me that they couldn't focus in on that and make revenue from that reliable core of people that, like me, turn to Twitter before anywhere else when something is happening. But I guess that didn't raise growth numbers, and that's what Wall Street wants to see. So instead they're making all these desperate moves, messing with the timeline and even considering removing the character limit - things that made Twitter special in the first place.
I can't help but think that Twitter could've gotten to where it is today without needing to shut down Vine, if it weren't so hell bent on being the next Facebook sized Internet giant.
> It astounds me that they couldn't focus in on that and make revenue from that reliable core of people that, like me, turn to Twitter before anywhere else when something is happening.
Yes, Twitter's role in BLM and Arab spring were invaluable contributions to history, but how much did they really add to the bottom line?
Even if it was a significant chunk, how much can random external events like that be relied on to provide recurring revenue in the future?
> how much can random external events like that be relied on to provide recurring revenue in the future?
That's the entire function of a newspaper, to transform random events into revenue via an engaged readership.
It worked on me. In my case, BLM was what turned me into a never-miss-a-day Twitter user. There was a whole set of American voices I wasn't hearing through my normal sources. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Exactly. Missing out on Twitter means missing out on an irreplaceable segment of current events. That is what makes Twitter the platform valuable.
To keep its current users, let alone grow, Twitter needs to focus on being the best possible place for people to find and post that kind of information.
Traditional newspapers aren't. But news as a category is doing extremely well. People read much more of it now than they did 20 years ago, and what they get is much more tuned to their interests.
Twitter in many ways replaces the editorial selection function of a newspaper. It doesn't write the articles, but it does let people get a personally tuned stream of news. It also in some ways replaces the opinion page; commentary on current news is a major source of tweets.
So yeah, they can't be a newspaper. But they could be part of what comes after it.
I think this is just more evidence that Twitter shouldn't have been a company.
I'm not saying that Twitter shouldn't exist or that it's not a valuable service, just that Twitter, Inc. is the wrong model for what Twitter is.
Twitter should've been like email: an open, interoperable standard where ISPs and other companies operate Twitter servers that federate with each other. Actually, Usenet is an even better comparison, as Twitter serves the same role in the 2010s that Usenet did in the 1990s. Back in the day, every ISP had an NNTP server, as did other companies like Forte and DejaNews/Google. Twitter should have used that model.
I can't help it, but I find it amusing to see Twitter and vision in the same sentence. I think the lack of vision is Twitter's biggest problem right now, and not having a dedicated CEO doesn't help.
Animated gifs with audio. That's it. Also super easy to create from a camera phone, no video or gif editing skills needed.
I know at least some content producers on youtube will be happy. A lot of vine hate comes from them when random anonymous vine user uploads a tiny portion of their long video and gets tons of views and maybe some ad revenue (or at least takes away potential ad revenue from the youtuber). It's resulted in youtubers creating short clips by themselves on their channel or sister channels, but I can see the annoyance, if not fully understand the complaint since it's no different from the timeless complaint about media being easier and cheaper to distribute and consume than to create.
Although a similar content format is available elsewhere, Vine's content and community is pretty unique to their app. I'm disappointed to see it get shut down in that light
comScore reports just under 5m uniques for Vine.co last month. It may be down on the height of its popularity but 5m unique users is a decent mass of people to monetise. Seems an odd thing to kill and not at least try to sell.
I think this is the wrong way to look at Vine's impact.
If you search Youtube for monthly Vine compilations (ie Oct 2016 Vines) these videos have millions of views - enough to make some of these Vine stars into minor celebrities (look up King Bach).
Vine pretty much started the short form video craze.
Twitter missed the opportunity to make it so people visited the Vine app to view these compilations, which would have maybe encouraged the creators to only make content for Vine.
They dropped the ball, and now the top creators all use their competitors.
I read on Reddit that they made an attempt to sell it but nobody was interested. I'm not sure how true that is, but it does seem very weird to kill off Vine.
YouTube is long form video though. Plenty of content to advertise on. Where are you going to cram ads in to vine without it being annoying enough for adblockers to nuke them?
It's fun that we consider 3 minute clips to be "long form" nowadays. When YouTube was being bought people said that it only consisted of short amateur clips and copyright violations; two things advertisers would supposedly not be interested in.
Now I'm not saying that Vine is the next YouTube or even that it is monetizable, just that "we haven't figured it out yet" is not a convincing argument, and surely its userbase would be appealing to some buyer.
Well to be honest I'm not a hive mind. When I said long form it's quite likely I was mistaken. I was under the impression YouTube started with 15 minute videos which is infinitely longer than 6 second clips or whatever vine is.
"We're losing money on it and have to fire people from the main company we should probably not keep this thing alive and we dont want competitors to our main product now it does videos neither" is definitely a convincing argument
What in Twitter's past makes you believe that b/c they are making this decision that it must be the right one? What decisions in their past instills this confidence?
I think Twitter is just failing hard right now and the shit has hit in the fan with investors. They are now on the "let's focus on our core product" phase of failing and hey, maybe it'll work, but that doesn't mean Vine is worthless.
That's probably a very grey area heading towards subliminal advertising (at least, some lawyer somewhere could claim so). I'm not sure on the legal status of that sort of thing.
I'm noticing very short ads on YouTube (about 5sec) which are cheaper and more effective (ime) than the longer ones, which are usually skipped before they communicate the message and cause (more) annoyance.
We're in the realm of speculation here, not a lawyer etc. 5 seconds is a fairly decent amount of time if you count it out. Plenty of time to register what you're seeing.
1 second (and below) it might be possible to argue it's too short to register the advert consciously, making it a subliminal advert. Again I don't know if this is true and I'm completely making this up. It'd be interesting to find out the answer.
A second is enough time to consciously register an ad. To prove it, they could run a bit where someone shouts "50 percent?!" with a picture of an iPad and "Tap! 50% off". I'll bet people start tapping by the second or third impression (even though it's obviously a scam of some kind).
Why not the same way Instagram has? Or SnapChat? The most-prominent Vine users craft a brand, and companies can do the same thing if they're engaging enough.
I don't know how snapchat is monetized. An Instagram ad though is an image in a sea of images for the most part. Easy to digest, not worth skipping through while you're browsing images, they feel like they belong. I'm not sure you can replicate that with videos.
I'm not sure what you mean by the Vine users crafting a brand though. Companies having a brand on Vine doesn't make Vine money.
I don't know what snapchat are doing these days, my friend circle stopped using it a while back. I mean it's probably relevant if it's all still images/videos that delete themselves.
How do they go about their adverts for the uninitiated?
They have a section called 'Discover' where they've invited BuzzFeed, Cosmo, Sky News to produce native content for them that links to their web properties.
They're consumed as part of the regular Snapchat experience and an extension of the Snapchat 'Stories' idea.
This is really annoying. I don't and haven't ever used vine, but how much could it really cost to keep hosting it, and let people continue using it? Why can't companies be okay having products that are revenue neutral that make people happy?
Because then people turn around and complain that it's not being improved.
Seriously, you can't win here.
If you kill it because it costs something and you have no plan to ever keep it going, people complain
If you let it live but just "keep it working", people also complain.
Additionally, killing it brings certain nice guarantees, like, for example, "you can stop worrying about security bugs, privacy bugs, etc at some point" because it's gone.
You can't really just keep stuff working anymore, even in the simple case, new attacks get found that apply to old code, etc.
When those things get busted, or bad things happen, people complain about it.
As for "why not just put one person on it", there's a multitude of reasons. Let's start with "what is the career path for a guy who does nothing but keep a dead product walking?"
So in reality, what people want is "keep focusing on products i care about". But that isn't always a viable model.
Maybe they think spinning it out will cost more money than they'll be able to sell it for? It only existed as a standalone service for a few months, at this point it might not be possible to unravel it from the internal Twitter infrastructure.
All the Vine celebrities have moved on to Instagram and YouTube. I opened it up a few weeks ago, forgetting I still had it installed in a folder, and all the big names I followed hadn't published anything in months. So I deleted the app and decided it was pretty much finished.
It would be a huge shame if the same fate befell Periscope which I find hugely intriguing - just the ability to look at some arbitrary place in the world.
Never used Vine app and the vine video don't render on my browser which has flash disabled. But having just read the features of vine app, I'm surprised Twitter decided to let this go. An app which allows creating and playing 6 second video in a loop would, IMO, have been a good fit for advertising content creators and Twitter could have used Vine as one core product in their advertising platform - after all advertising is what is considered as the primary way to make money from services like Twitter.
I don't think advertisers would be happy with the 6-second format. If you could deliver a meaningful brand message in such a short amount of time, YouTube ads would look very different. (My proposition being that no-one ever watches more than the 5 seconds before the "Skip ad" button appears.)
I always thought the main Vine user base was mobile users. That's the only place I've ever used it - which isn't much tbh.
Ironic how everything you create these days has to mobile ready huh? Then here's a company dumping a pretty popular app which is used mainly by a younger demographic who lives by their phones and social media?
I don't see this as a good move - and if its being done to cut costs, it's still not a good move.
Yup, it's business suicide. Probably people too inexperienced to handle success or have a clue where to go from where they're at. So they throw up their hands, shutdown servers, let people down and miss their shot. It's sad, like watching a train wreck.
This is pretty sad. I'm not a "proper" Vine user -- I don't even have the app installed -- but I've long loved seeing vines via Twitter or Tumblr. I hope a similar product comes along to fill the void and reunite the Vine community (introducing: YouTube Loops??).
I loved Vine. Short hilarious videos galore. Not long winded vlogs on youtube.
I'll be pretty sad to see it go. :/ I think that the time limit was great and made people quite creative with how they used the time. the ehBee family was one example.
Seems like twitter is really starting to cut fat and trim down. I'm not surprised at all. No one bought them out. They seem to be overstaffed with a head count of ~2,300.
(Sadly) We should've expected this the moment Twitter acquire Vine. The Vine team no doubt brought some amazing improvements to Twitter since 2012. Sad to see it go.
It's kinda fun seeing a front-page of Vine at any date at the archive.org:
So... Vine is shutting down? Why mince words? The app is the only part of the service that you can use to generate content, unless I'm missing something.
I don't get it, i mean vine is not changing the world but it still produces a ton of very popular content. Seems like a huge active project to throw out.
I'm not surprised. The application never worked in browsers. Everyone was complaining about it for years. It was never fixed. You had to click the play button twenty times to make it play. It was absolutely frustrating experience and I just put a mental block on vine.co domain and app.
After the big Viners left for Instagram and YouTube, many viewers left with them. There were some holdouts, but instead of garnering 8 million views (what they achieved consistently before) they were lucky if they got 3 to 4 million views. It really felt like the community was dying.
Much of it has to do with monetization for content creators. They went where the money is. If the big content creators leave, what else is there for most viewers? The shrinking community also meant no one new trying to become famous would touch Vine and produce content for it.
Truly shocking. I've mildly enjoyed Vines (not so much the community), and I love the Twitter platform. But now I have no faith in the company or the direction they are trying to find. Yikes.
If you have followed the scene for the last months they all switched to Facebook (Viral comedy-sketches á la Vine + Facebook Live) and doing daily Vlogs on YouTube. Check e.g. Logan Paul as a reference.
Switch to Instagram or youtube probably. I'm wondering how much they were able to actually make given Vine was unmonitized so any money had to come from outside deals like brand deals.
Do you mean if “Vine stars” is a thing? Yes, it is. The top viners had millions of followers, some close to 10 million. They became so famous they could transition to TV, movies, fashion shoots. Many took their following to Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
I applaud Jack for making a big move to try to save Twitter. I hope to see more big bets from them, especially in the main app. The current course clearly isn't working.
I've been hearing about Twitter for 7, maybe 8 years, working in and out of startups and corporate developer culture.
There's universally one thing I've always heard about the company - 'what's their plan?' 'how are they going to monetize?' 'where's the money coming from?'
This hasn't changed, or even become more or less obvious in almost a decade.
It wouldn't be that good of a reference. Full disclosure: I led the backend team at Vine a while back.
Vine didn't use a lot of Flask. The main piece that was used was routing (i.e. @app.route). Everything else was custom. Even flask.g was replaced with something that can propagate context properly across greenlets (the method of concurrency we chose), without a lot of overhead. If you're curious, that piece eventually became https://github.com/mikekap/gbatchy though I can't say that's well supported now.
The main takeaway from that codebase is: async needs to be part of the language. Having it be bolted on leads to...unpleasant hacks. I think Python 3.5+ is heading in the right direction there, but Vine was stuck in 2.7-land forevermore (mostly because we wanted to keep pypy compatibility even though pypy was never rolled out; not the best reason).
No, I'm talking about Vine. They use Flask, and if they are not going to use the codebase any longer...
Personally I like having a big codebase as an architectural reference when I'm trying to learn a new framework. The Patreon source code (Flask too) is public, by the way.
Congress should make it illegal for a public company to shut down apps that see this much usage, unless the employees are quitting. Some users have 12 million followers.
That is the last possible thing we'd want. We already have contract law that covers the case where a customer has paid a provider to provide a service and the service provider stops without delivering. But, in the case of a free service, where there are no commitments, service providers should be free to stop providing services whenever they want.
So you think it should be legal for Facebook to decide to shut down, for example? Why does what the investors want matter more than what the users want?
Because they own it, broadly speaking. I would not be at all averse to the government nationalising Twitter (e.g. after acquiring their assets when they go bankrupt, or by buying out the current shareholders), but while it remains a private or public company it should have the governance process of one.
How could it be illegal for Facebook to shut down? Who would pay for keeping the platform up if Facebook, Inc. doesn't want it or can't afford it anymore?
I guess there could be a government bailout as what happened with General Motors in 2008. That would mean a Chapter 11 scenario at least, and wouldn't help in the situation where Facebook isn't bankrupt but simply wants to focus on something else.
Of course it should be legal for Facebook to shut down. Under what possible sense of human rights would it not be? Let's say that every last employee wanted to quit. Your proposal would require that the government would send the police over to prevent them from leaving and keep them monitoring the servers, etc.
Oh god, can you imagine the premiums on a policy where the probability of payout is "chances a startup fails" and the cost of payout is "enough money to run a failing startup indefinitely"?
