Twitter bought Vine, an app that allowed users to take 6-second videos that would loop, in 2012.
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
from Twitter new owner and CEO Elon Musk plans to bring back Vine, the short-form video app that Twitter bought and abandoned long before TikTok made the format popular.
The possible Vine The revival shows the breadth of product ideas — including old ones — that Musk is toying with in his first week at the helm of Twitter.
A person who works for Twitter said exploratory discussions were taking place within the social network about a possible Vine revival, which was first reported by Axios. The person asked to remain anonymous without permission to speak on behalf of the company.
It’s unclear how a Vine overhaul and brand revival would fit in with other big questions looming over Twitter, like whether Musk will order mass layoffs or other cost-cutting measures or try to raise subscription revenue.
Musk tweeted more than 20 times Saturday and Sunday, offering mostly conflicting signals about where it wants to take Twitter and doing little to allay fears that hate speech and misinformation will thrive under new rules.
One of his tweets was a Vine poll, with nearly 70% of respondents voting in favor of his return.
A few popular former Vine stars seemed receptive to the app’s potential resurrection.
Zach King replied to musk with a heart emoji.
Lele Pons retweeted Musk and wrote: “Yes, please @elonmusk. Do it!!!”
Musk also solicited ideas on how to make a revived vine better than TikTok.
“What could we do to make it better than TikTok?” he wrote in response to Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, who is one of the most popular YouTube creators.
Donaldson had responded to Musk’s Twitter poll, writing: “If you did this and compete with tik tok, it would be hilarious”
Axios reported that Musk wants a reboot that could be ready by the end of the year.
But some said it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to bring Vine back after Twitter shut down in 2016.
Sara Beykpour, a former Twitter employee who worked on Vine, said the original Vine software may have been too old to be useful now.
“This code is over 6 years old. Some of it is over 10 years old. You don’t want to look there. If you want to revive Vine, you should start over,” Beykpour wrote on Twitter.
Twitter bought Vine in 2012 for $30 million, CNBC reported. Like TikTok years later, the app allowed users to make a short video – just 6 seconds in Vine’s case – and then repeatedly play it on a loop in a stream with other videos.
When Vine didn’t take off, Twitter shut it down in 2016, prompting a joke from Pornhub and one of Vine’s founders regretting selling it.
Rus Yusupov, co-founder of Vine, has tweeted that Vine failed because it didn’t build the right features in time, didn’t help creators make money, and didn’t embrace lip-syncing videos as a trend like TikTok.
Instagram in 2020 spear its own version of looping videos, called Reels, to cater to TikTok’s popularity.