Reports claim that Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk has big plans for the company. Axios claims that Musk has instructed Twitter engineers to work on the Vine’s reboot by the end of this year.
Vine was a popular video-sharing app that let users post up to six seconds of looping video clips. Twitter acquired Vine in 2012 before its official release in 2013. By the end of 2015, the app had 200 million users but the micro-blogging company disabled new uploads in 2016 and only viewing and downloads were allowed.
And after an archive of all Vine videos was introduced in 2017, it was discontinued in 2019. The service was put in an “archival state” in 2022.
However, the video sharing genre in social media dynamic has changed drastically since 2016 when Vine was made shut down all thanks to TikTok. The popularity and growth of TikTok has compelled established social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat to clone its functionality.
Twitter engineers have till the end of 2022 to reboot the Vine app
It appears that Musk wants to relaunch the Vine app as a competing video-sharing app by the end of the year. The report states that engineers are given a tight deadline to update Vine’s code, which requires a lot of work, per a source.
Twitter engineers already have been assigned to look at Vine’s old code base, which hasn’t been changed or updated since the shutdown. One source says “it needs a lot of work.”
Twitter has introduced new video features since 2016, but reviving Vine could give video creators a platform that sits somewhat apart from general Twitter discourse.
In a short correspondence with YouTuber MrBeast on Twitter, Musk asked what could be done to make Vine better than TikTok.
Popular YouTube star MrBeast tweeted in response, “If you did that and actually competed with tik tok that’d be hilarious,” to which Musk replied, “What could we do to make it better than TikTok?”
Earlier, it was also reported that Musk told the engineers to introduce a new paid verification system by November 7 which will require users to subscribe to Twitter Blue for $20 per month to keep their verified status. A new verification system and Vine are likely to boost the company’s revenue.
