It’s the Snapchat that never was. Or was briefly at least. Everyone remembers Vine, right? Well, probably not. But we have to try to remember an app that was in service for five whole years in a positive light. For a short period of time, it was the most downloaded app on the App Store.
The premise of Vine was simple: users could upload six second videos and they would loop endlessly. It provided minutes of entertaining content posted from every average Joe all over the globe. It even launched the now waning social media careers of personalities such as Tish Simmonds, who found her fifteen minutes of fame sitting in her mom’s car. Broom broom. Everything was looking fruitful for Vine, as the technology world seemed to go loopy for the looped videos.
That was until, a little-known app called Instagram stepped into the limelight and mercilessly robbed Vine of their users by offering the ability to upload fifteen second video clips, as opposed to the six seconds offered by Vine. A spokesperson at Vine has since reflected that Instagram was definitely the “beginning of the end ” for Vine, and as such, the company announced their closure in October 2016. This event passed by quietly and as such, it seemed that Vine was to follow the examples of Bebo, Myspace and more recently, Google Plus, and fade into the obscurity of social media heaven. Until now.
Only last week, Vine founder Dan Hoffman announced that Vine was to be resurrected in the form of Byte, and will be available for not-so-eagerly-awaited download in spring 2019. There is no word on how Byte will differ from Vine’s inability to compete with other apps yet, but for die-hard fans of the now-forgotten video app, this announcement has got to be good news.
