Remember Vine? That might be coming back.
As reported by Axios, Elon Musk has asked developers inside Twitter to start reviewing the code for Vine for a possible reboot inside the platform. Musk acquired the company last week and has already been making sweeping changes. One of them appears to be a potential resurrection of Vine, a social media platform that died after Twitter acquired it years ago. The video platform was based on the concept of running six-second looping videos. Vine, in a way, was TikTok before TikTok became a thing.
Twitter has always featured video, but it’s always been stuck as an attachment inside a tweet. The company did attempt to bring more video to the platform with its “Fleets” feature, which served as another Snapchat Stories ripoff. Users, however, didn’t really take to the feature enough and the company killed it not long after launching it.
It appears that Musk, like every other social media giant, has recognized video as another crucial area for the company after seeing TikTok’s recent domination. The new owner of Twitter seems to hope that Vine, or at least the mechanics of it, might be a potential competitor to TikTok. It’s currently unclear if Vine would live outside of Twitter but that’s unlikely. If Musk does resurrect Vine, it will likely be more as a video feature inside of Twitter rather than a separate app.
The move seems to have come after Musk ran a poll over the weekend to see if people wanted the company to bring Vine back in some way:
Musk is said to have discussed Vine in the months leading up to his Twitter acquisition, and on Sunday launched a Twitter poll asking if he should bring it back. Responses were running about 2-1 in favor, as of this writing.
Years after Vine died, it almost came back as V2 with support from the co-founder, but that idea never came to fruition.
