It’s been less than a week since Tesla CEO Elon Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter and the popular microblogging site has already started bringing about changes to the platform.
Apparently, Twitter is looking to revive the microblogging site’s short-form video app, Vine so that it could take on popular Chinese short-video sensation, TikTok reports Axios citing multiple sources.
Musk has asked Twitter engineers to work on a rebooted version of Vine so that it could be ready by the end of the year.
Vine’s old code base, which hasn’t been changed or updated since the shutdown six years ago, has already been assigned to the engineers to be worked on, states the report.
In fact, one of the sources told Axios that the code of the service “needs a lot of work” to get it back up and running.
The new Twitter boss and CEO Musk on Sunday conducted a poll with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on his Twitter account, asking his followers whether he should bring back the defunct video platform with the caption, “Bring back Vine?”.
One user commented, “I think it would be a great idea to bring back Vine. It was a great platform for creative content and I think there is still a lot of potential there.”
Another user commented, “What, basically Twitter had TikTok 10 years ago (Vine) with 200 million users and shut it down. Stupidest thing they ever did, from a business POV. It was awesome.”
Of the 4,920,155 votes that the poll received, a majority (69.6%) of users have voted in favor of reviving the app, while 30.4% have voted against it.
Bring back Vine?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022
About Vine
Vine was an American short-form video hosting service founded in June 2012 by Dom Hoffman, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll. The app was acquired by Twitter in October 2012 for $30 million and released to the public in 2013 as a free app for iOS and Android devices.
The short-form video service allowed users to share six-second-long looping video clips, which would then play in a loop. Videos published on Vine’s social network could also be shared on different social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
By December 2015, Vine had over 200 million active users and competed with other social media services such as Instagram and Pheed. However, the Vine mobile app was shut down by the microblogging platform in October 2016 but was still available for users to view and download Vine videos.
In January 2017, Twitter went on to launch an Internet archive of all Vine videos, allowing people to continue watching previously filmed Vine videos. However, this was officially discontinued in April 2019. As of 2022, the service was closed and put into an “archival state”.
Revival of Vine is one of the few changes that Musk is looking to bring to Twitter following the takeover.
There are also reports that the new CEO is considering implementing a pay-for-verification system on Twitter that would require its users to pay $19.99 per month if they want a verification tick for a Twitter Blue subscription.
