In reality, Elon Musk’s landing on Twitter was the closest thing to a business typhoon. The sequence is short but intense. Let’s see. Over the past week, he has walked around the company’s offices with a sink in his arms, firing his senior executives, dissolving the board, declaring himself CEO, and giving the staff a good grade. Among tweets in which he flaunts his belief as an “absolutist of free speech”—a hashtag he has assumed—he leaves sentences such as: “bird free”.

Among such a crowd, one of the ideas Musk profiled a few days ago has probably escaped more than one eye: the return of Vine. “Bringing Vine back?”businessman tweeted along with a survey 4.9 million votes -Perhaps this shows the interest aroused by the proposal, which won an overwhelming majority of the yes votes, almost 70%.

The poll sparked speculation as to whether the billionaire was considering buying Vine back. They even went a step further at Axios and published on the same day that the new owner of Twitter has appointed and hired a team of engineers to move in that direction: restart the network considering the short term, the remaining time. 2022 months.

But… What is Vine?

some memory

Its history was short, but to some extent it managed to predict the momentum that short videos would gain on networks, turning TikTok into a giant emulated by other platforms.

Vine’s origins just ten years agoIn June 2012, Dom Hofmann and Russian YusuPov launched a social network with an idea that would eventually prove a winner: micro-videos, short, nimble recordings of just six seconds played in a loop. It’s easy to do. It’s easy to share. The idea was good and they knew how to sniff it on Twitter. So just a few months later, in October, he put $30 million on the table to buy it.

The next chapter in this heart-stopping chronology came a few months later, in mid-January 2013, when Vine officially launched. First with iOS, and then – at the end of the same year – for Android and Windows Phone. Its versatility is not only reinforced; its footprint also expanded with new resources and above all more parishioners. If by mid-2013 it had 13 million registered users, just a few months later it was around 40.

Over time, Vine, which can be managed both on the mobile app and on the website, has displayed an increasingly comprehensive and attractive toolbox. If you got this done, you can remember Effect stop the movement or loops collected these videos. This is in addition to resources we manage on other platforms, including Twitter itself, such as mentions or messages. Over time, I would increase the length of the videos to 140 seconds.

Bringing Vine back?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 31 October 2022

The resource attracted users, sparked Twitter with the shared videos… and promised a very interesting resource for advertisers looking to launch. Promotion. what was your problem? He didn’t know how to fight in an increasingly competitive arena, he also started having some content issues and failed to fine-tune the monetization key, which made him less attractive among the most popular creators.

Mesh of white V with green background began to resent From the competition of Instagram, Snapchat or other alternatives with a similar approach like Keek, Tout or Viddy. Neither Twitter’s identity crisis nor its difficulties in fitting it into its strategy helped him much.

In October 2016, Twitter put the finishing touches and announced plans to shut down the micro-video social network, inviting users to download their creations from the network. The announcement came in a complex context for Twitter: along with the announcement that nearly 350 employees, 9% of the workforce, were laid off in 2017 as part of efforts to drive profitability.

The stage was completed with other mats not in Vine’s favour, such as the platform’s stagnation, its inability to keep up after some groundbreaking starts. “It hadn’t been renewed for a long time, it invented a groundbreaking format but stayed where it was”, one of the most famous Spanish creators on Vine, Gazz lamented.

It wouldn’t take long for the shutdown to be complete: It took place on January 18, 2017, shortly after its birth, on more complex ground. Co-founder Dom Hoffman didn’t throw in the towel and announced Byte, which will replace him in early 2020. Now the old micro video platform can enjoy a second chance at the hands of Twitter’s new owner.

The public at least already pronounced.

Cover image: Esther Vargas (Flickr)