On October 27 it was announced that the popular app Vine will no longer be available for use. The app, used for creating six-second looped videos, has been around since 2013 and became very popular for sharing videos with friends.
Twitter bought vine for $30 million in 2012 before the app was officially launched 2013. After 4 years Twitter announced that in the coming months, they will be discontinuing the app. This comes just one day after Twitter announced that they will be cutting its workforce by 9%, about 350 people, due to slow social media growth.
Vine just could not compete with the other video services and the original founders moved on to other projects. The decline of Vine began just after Instagram added 15-second videos to their platform. With the addition of the growing popularity of Snapchat, Vine was done for. Twitter could not sell the company because their asking price was too high.
The app has launched the careers of many people most notably singers Shawn Mendes and Tori Kelly. It has also given us many catch phrases such as, “Eyebrows on fleek!”, “OOOHHH Kill ‘em”, and “Do it for the vine.”
One of the three co-founders of Vine, Rus Yusupov, took to twitter to write: “Don’t sell your company!”
For everyone worried that their memories will be lost, you have nothing to worry about- for now. Vine released at statement on the website Medium, “Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today. We value you, your Vines, and are going to do this the right way. You’ll be able to access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made. You will be notified before we make any changes to the app or website.”
Bye Vine, we will miss you.