Elon Musk has thrown an unusual task at his Twitter developers, reportedly asking them to revive Vine, an old video-sharing app shut down by Twitter.
Twitter purchased the app, which allowed users to share six-second clips, back in 2012.
The social media giant forked out $US30 million ($46.7 million) to acquire Vine, which had 200 million active users at the peak of its popularity.
Just four years later, Twitter decided to shut down Vine after a long struggle to monetise its content.
Vine was thought to be gone forever, having already spent six years in the proverbial digital graveyard, but Mr Musk has shown interest in bringing it back from the dead.
The self-proclaimed Chief Twit asked his followers on Monday whether he should bring Vine back, with 69.6 per cent of the 4,920,155 votes saying ‘yes’.
Tweet from @elonmusk
Vine’s influence
TikTok now reigns supreme as the ultimate video-sharing social media platform, but Vine was once the one to beat.
TikTok now has a time limit of 10 minutes, previously three minutes, and Instagram’s Reels can be up to 90 seconds long.
Vine, however, had a strict six-second time limit, with these videos watched in users’ feeds on repeat in a looping format.
Plus, with no other platforms quite like Vine at the time it arrived online, Vine was able to carve out a lane of its own.
Depending on which way you look at it, Vine’s teeny time limit either made creating content incredibly straightforward, or a massive challenge.
Although TikTok is full of lengthy explainers and sing-along videos, Vines were far more spur of the moment, with short snippets made by everyday people becoming pieces of internet meme-story.
Users with barely any social media content could easily pick up their phones and take a basic six-second video with family and friends.
On the other hand, the six-second limit was challenging when it came to planned and scripted content.
Drew Gooden, now a YouTuber with almost four million subscribers, was one of Vine’s largest and most influential creators.
In a retrospective video about his time on the platform, Gooden spoke about the ongoing difficulty of hitting the six-second mark.
“A lot of the things that made Vine good were unfortunately the things that made Vine doomed to fail,” Gooden said.
“In the same way that Vine was accessible to creators, it was also pretty limiting because [the time limit] was six seconds long.
“I can’t tell you how many times I would sit there trying to edit a Vine shorter and shorter and I could get it to, like, eight seconds, and [couldn’t make it] any shorter.
“As your ideas start to get more elaborate, you need to go to other platforms to express those ideas.”
Gooden even experimented with creating individual videos that could be watched in order, adding up to longer-form skits.
But with Vine continually resisting calls to expand its time limit, its creators eventually drifted elsewhere.
Vine’s downfall
Vine was the launchpad for several influencers and celebrities that are still popular to this day.
Pop singer Shawn Mendes, internet personalities Jake and Logan Paul and vlogger David Dobrik all found fame and success on the platform.
But as Gooden said, these influencers all left the platform in pursuit of platforms that allowed for longer-form content, such as YouTube.
Twitter was in the midst of financial and leadership turmoil in the mid-2010s, with a number of senior executives jumping ship.
Thanks to the distraction of its parent company, Vine was slow to work on monetising the platform, meaning that its creators did not profit from making Vines.
By the end of 2015, major advertisers including Coca-Cola and Nike had moved on to Vine’s competitors, namely Instagram and Snapchat.
With no stream of revenue to its creators, the majority of Vine influencers had stopped posting content.
In a last-ditch effort to save the platform, Vine even changed its maximum video length from six seconds to 140 seconds, after years of stubbornness.
The company even agreed to a meeting with its top influencers, who asked for $1.2 million each in return for sharing 12 Vines a month – an offer that Vine executives turned down.
With very little left of the once-popular platform, Twitter announced that it would be gradually shutting down Vine in October 2016.
The shut down was completed on January 18, 2017, with content made by its millions of users made available in a public archive.
This archive, too, was eventually shut down.
Now, nothing remaining of Vine online, except for countless compilations on YouTube, which still rack up millions of views.
And many of these videos are dearly loved, and still referenced in popular culture to this day.
Vine’s successor
Vine’s downfall was one of the driving forces for TikTok’s success.
Social media users shared their outrage with Twitter in 2016 upon their announcement they would be abandoning the platform.
With so many thirsty for the short-form comedy Vine had offered, many drifted to another platform called Musical.ly, which allowed for videos up to 15 seconds long.
In November 2017, Musical.ly was acquired for $1 billion by Chinese tech company ByteDance, which already owned TikTok.
In August 2018, TikTok absorbed Musical.ly, and the rest was history.
With TikTok now having about one billion active users, five times that of Vine’s peak user base, TikTok is everything Vine wanted to be – and very well could have been.
TikTok has established monetisation through advertisements and donations to creators, meaning TikTokers can very well make a living off the platform.
In February, TikTok expanded its maximum video length to 10 minutes, up from three minutes, and added in a live-stream feature which has proven to be immensely popular.
With Vine now a decade old, and six years in the grave, the platform has very few comparable features to TikTok.
If Twitter does indeed bring it back, it will effectively need to start from scratch.
Sara Beykpour, a former Twitter employee who worked alongside the Vine team, suggested Mr Musk’s team would likely need to work from the ground up.
“Some free advice, from someone who worked at Vine and also led the shutdown of Vine,” Ms Beykpour tweeted on Tuesday.
“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,” she wrote.
“Trust me on this one guys.”
Not only would Vine be up against TikTok, but it would also face the likes of Instagram and YouTube, which have respectively created ‘Shorts’ and ‘Reels’ suited to short form content.
