Vine will be discontinuing the mobile app
medium.com
medium.com
MLB? NFL? NBA? I'm sure money's being exchanged to make it worthwhile to handle that.
I'm not suggesting Vine was superseded per se, as its users were generating a ton of content even to this moment, but at least from my perspective it seems its main users have had suitable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.
Shocking, shocking I say!
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
They're still working on figuring out the rest of the goals.
When twitter.com already has videos that support those features why keep an antiquated app around?
Whatever dedicated video app Facebook is going to release one assumes that it will probably be a lot more like Periscope than Vine.
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.
- Founder of Vine
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?
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Exactly. And newspapers aren't doing so well on the internet.
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'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.
That's almost certainly the case.
Sad news keeps coming today... :(
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
But I've also seen weirdly long ads - 10 minute ad on a 7 minute video, 30 minute ad on an hour long video.
I'm also noticing some ads have a loud noise at the beginning of a 30 second skippable ad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxg7fse74MY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crwU9aUNHE
It's really annoying.
This is the kind of thing that drives people to ad-blocking.
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.
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.
They're solving it by bringing native content from partners on board - would have thought Twitter would do the same with Vine.
How do they go about their adverts for the uninitiated?
They're consumed as part of the regular Snapchat experience and an extension of the Snapchat 'Stories' idea.
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.
If nothing else, it seems like a fantastic ad platform addition.
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.
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.
Sad though.
It's kinda fun seeing a front-page of Vine at any date at the archive.org:
Twitter acquired Vine before the Vine app/service initially launched. So I don't think that sentiment makes sense in this specific case :)
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.
Watching https://vine.co/Trench play tunes of Vine was fun content to watch with my 2-year-old daughter.
It's probably a pretty awesome code base
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.
Sounds like you agree?
Youtube just seems a pain in comparison
Well, that was fast :S
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.
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).
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.
And you also have here a direct download of the full leak, including the database:
https://archive.org/details/B93B1C2921EFF0846DA268968755D01B...
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.
Someone should start an insurance company for startup users. ;)