14 ms·
Vine will be discontinuing the mobile app
- vermontdevil 10y agoWhy not just sell it? I'm sure there's a buyer somewhere.
- mason55 10y agoMaybe 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.
- MarkEthan 10y agoI imagine it's a combination of this and wanting Vine users to use the native Twitter video functionality rather than be owned by another company. https://about.twitter.com/videos-on-twitter https://about.twitter.com/videos-on-twitter
- zzzzzzzzzman 10y agoWow, I really like Vine and am surprised that Twitter's visions for its path to profitability don't include such a flourishing community. Sad news keeps coming today... :(
- yabatopia 10y agoI 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.
- zzzzzzzzzman 10y agoI agree, but surely as a public company there needs to be some kind of vision somewhere :)
- majewsky 10y agoA surprising amount of companies have "make money" as their only vision. Twitter is just bad at making you think otherwise.
- imglorp 10y agoMaybe you could explain what's appealing about Vine? A lot of people don't understand what it offers over a tube site.
- greendragon 10y agoAnimated 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.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 10y agoDoesn'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.
- rm999 10y agoIf 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.
- Shank 10y agoVine'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.
- lucideer 10y agoI 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).
- firasd 10y agoThey 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.
- vit05 10y agoPeriscope is live video, it is different. 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.
- cunotaco 10y agoInstagram (Facebook) ate it. Would be nice, by the way, if they could release the source code. Having such an example of a Flask app would be very useful for the community.
- mburst 10y agoI believe Instagram uses Django https://engineering.instagram.com/web-service-efficiency-at-instagram-with-python-4976d078e366 https://engineering.instagram.com/web-service-efficiency-at-... In any case it's still a pretty popular site/app on it's own. I don't see Facebook killing it anytime soon.
- cunotaco 10y agoNo, 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.
- misiti3780 10y agoit is ? can you provide a link. it was hacked right ?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cunotaco 10y agoYes it was hacked. Here's a list of the files: https://goo.gl/3K1VVF https://goo.gl/3K1VVF And you also have here a direct download of the full leak, including the database: https://archive.org/details/B93B1C2921EFF0846DA268968755D01B6E9698DA https://archive.org/details/B93B1C2921EFF0846DA268968755D01B...
- r3bl 10y agoI believe he was referring to Vine in the second part of his comment, not Instagram.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- robtaylor 10y agoAnother lesson on brands being platform agnostic, big Vine, Twitter, Facebook, $whatever numbers count for nowt.
- konradb 10y agoIt 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.
- caractacus 10y agocomScore 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.
- lquas 10y agoI 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.
- cm3 10y agoHow relevant is that metric given that users will predominantly use the mobile app?
- corobo 10y agoHow would you go about making any money off it though? Nobody's going to sit through an ad when the video is only a few seconds long
- Touche 10y agoI don't know the answer, but I do remember people saying that Google was making a huge mistake buying the unmonetizable YouTube.
- curiousgal 10y agoI never knew Vine was part of Twitter, I guess that explains the horrible UX of the web version.
- xxbondsxx 10y agoAlthough 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
- thisisdallas 10y agoSeems strange. If nothing else, it seems like a fantastic ad platform addition.
- jackfrodo 10y agoThis 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?
- hart_russell 10y agoWho says it was revenue neutral?
- bronson 10y agoRight. Given Twitter's headcount, Vine probably has 550 people working on it.
- thegoodhands 10y agoHosting, computing and bandwidth cost won't be a small thing
- JumpCrisscross 10y agoThose are lots of assumptions about a company burning half a billion dollars a year.
- metellus 10y agoEverything needs maintenance.
- DannyBee 10y agoBecause 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.
- jorblumesea 10y agoSnapchat and Instagram moved too quickly and changed the market. Starting to think that Twitter woes are mismanagement related.
- artursapek 10y ago> Starting to think that Twitter woes are mismanagement related. That's almost certainly the case.
- majewsky 10y agoYou're only starting now?
- oxguy3 10y agoThis 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??).
- xentronium 10y agocoub.com? I thought it was quite popular, but apparently that's only in Russia.
- OoTheNigerian 10y agoI don't get it. Why not make it Twitter's Dedicated Video App as vine already has a strong network which can be built upon. Very soon Facebook will release their dedicated video app and Twitter will be looking clueless. I don't get big companies
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wcummings 10y agoIntegrating two services of this scale isn't trivial or inexpensive, even for a big company. Especially for a big company that is laying people off.
- TillE 10y agoThe "integration" doesn't need to be incredibly sophisticated. Look at Periscope.
- mrtron 10y agoI think it doesn't fit their 'live' mission.
- dawnerd 10y agoTwitter has no idea what they're doing and they haven't for a very long time.
- skylan_q 10y agoOne of Twitter's goals is to not make it look like they don't know what they're doing. They're still working on figuring out the rest of the goals.
- paulddraper 10y agoStealth mode
- 10y ago
- anigbrowl 10y agoThat'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.
- hmhrex 10y agoWell, 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.
- anigbrowl 10y agoI'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 :-/
- Grue3 10y agoNever 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.
- strictnein 10y agoIf Jack looks at Twitter as fulfilling some sort of social purpose, Periscope falls much more into that scope than Vine.
- downandout 10y agoPeriscope 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.
- protomyth 10y agoThey mentioned Periscope during their live demo at the Apple event, so I would hope it stays for a while.
- pbreit 10y agoLooks 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.
- mgkimsal 10y agoI'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.
- kilroy123 10y agoSeems 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. Sad though.
- danielcampos93 10y agobut what about all the vine stars? What will they livelihood become?
- philfrasty 10y agoIf 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.
- kodfodrasz 10y agoIs that actually a thing?
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y agoDo 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.
- rtkwe 10y agoSwitch 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.
- vecter 10y agoI 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.
- lostgame 10y ago'Current Course?' 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.
- vecter 10y agoI can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me ... Sounds like you agree?
- ohitsdom 10y agoTruly 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.
- smpetrey 10y ago(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: https://web.archive.org/web/20151202002305/https://vine.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151202002305/https://vine.co/
- evanelias 10y ago> We should've expected this the moment Twitter acquire Vine Twitter acquired Vine before the Vine app/service initially launched. So I don't think that sentiment makes sense in this specific case :)
- xyzzy4 10y agoCongress 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.
- sib 10y agoThat 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.
- xyzzy4 10y agoSo 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?
- lmm 10y agoBecause 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.
- pavlov 10y agoHow 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.
- sib 10y agoOf 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.
- EA 10y agoDid Instagram's Stories kill Vine? Watching https://vine.co/Trench https://vine.co/Trench play tunes of Vine was fun content to watch with my 2-year-old daughter.
- schwede 10y agoThat's interesting because Vine is shockingly popular with the younger generation.
- draw_down 10y agoIs it, though?
- kintamanimatt 10y agoWas. I haven't heard anybody talk about Vine in a long time.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y agoAfter 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.
- jarjoura 10y agoAll 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.
- winteriscoming 10y agoNever 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.
- majewsky 10y agoI 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.)
- djhworld 10y agoI enjoyed using Vine to create small little videos without much friction, you could share a loop with your friends really quickly. Youtube just seems a pain in comparison
- math0ne 10y agoI 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.
- microtherion 10y agoI never used Vine myself, but I suspect many eyebrows will be on half-fleek in mourning tonight.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agowatch it whip. watch it nae-nae. watch it go away.
- partiallypro 10y agoI 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.
- Disruptive_Dave 10y agoI'm not a Vine user but the #1 value that service brought to my life is via sports replay clips. They excelled at it.
- rmc 10y agoWhat an incredible journey!
- dejawu 10y agoWhat a shame. 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. Not every kingdom has to be an empire.
- marshray 10y ago> 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?
- wpietri 10y ago> 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.
- dejawu 10y agoExactly. 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.
- ggregoire 10y agoFrom the founder of Vine: https://twitter.com/rus/status/791681274339622913 https://twitter.com/rus/status/791681274339622913
- toomim 10y ago"Don't sell your company!" - Founder of Vine
- nextweek2 10y agoI don't understand (because I have never been in that position). And the TV show Silicon Valley also promoted this logic. However he exited at $30 million. Is his sentiment born out of a sense of nostalgia? Surely he is in a better position to create something than he was when he created Vine?
- napworth 10y agoVine 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.
- groovy2shoes 10y agoWas 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?
- teej 10y agoYou 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.
- at-fates-hands 10y agoI 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.
- a-no-n 10y agoYup, 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.
- shinratdr 10y agoSo... 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.
- misiti3780 10y agoAny chance they will open source it ? It's probably a pretty awesome code base
- jrnichols 10y agoI 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.
- amelius 10y ago"Vine is an entertainment community where things happen fast." Well, that was fast :S
- pkrumins 10y agoI'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.
- debraaa 10y agoI don't know about hacking but when my ex was cheating on me, a friend of mine referred me to Mr Robert I thought it wasn't real but he later proved me wrong by helping me to spy on my ex-husband and got me all the necessary evidence I needed. He helped me to hack and spy on his emails, mobile , all his social media and his bank accounts, Robert did all this remotely without touching his devices. You can contact him with mastershield55@gmail.com if you are in the same shoe as I was you can just tell him from Tammy Orthy