Over the last 15 years, the online landscape is littered with major social services that have come and gone. Some of them such as MySpace and Snapchat rode the quest of the cultural wave before sticking around as more modestly popular services. Then there are those that broke through the cultural zeitgeist, burned brightly, and went into the sunset. Vine is a prime example.
Vine – which was bought by Twitter – is a defining example of a social app that had its 15 minutes of fame. However, it may be coming back to the spotlight if new Twitter boss Elon Musk has his way. Following his recent $44bn takeover of the company, he has instructed Twitter engineers to work on a new version of Vine.
On his Twitter profile (amusingly with the bio “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator”), Musk run a poll asking if the company should resurrect Vine. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with 70% of respondents saying they should. This was no small sample either, with 4.9 million responses in total.
Challenges
If you’re unfamiliar with Vine, it was a micro-video-content app that would allow users to record visual snippets of up to six seconds. After its launch in 2012 it became increasingly popular and by 2015 had over 200 million active users.
It then fell off a cliff as other social platforms started implementing their own short video features. By 2016, Twitter had stopped all uploads on the Vine app, effectively ending it. A later web archive of all videos from Vine was launch but it too was later closed.
Whether Musk will follow through on user demand and bring back Vine is still unclear. Although, with video apps like TikTok thriving, it is hard to see how the restrictive nature of Vine would find success today.
Tip of the day: The Windows Clipboard history feature provides the functionality across device, space, and time, letting you copy on one computer and paste the text days later on a different PC. All of it is possible via the Windows 10 clipboard manager, which lets you view, delete, pin, and clear clipboard history at will.
In our tutorial we show you how to enable the feature, clear clipboard history, and enable/disable clipboard sync to meet your preferences. You can also create a clear clipboard shortcut for quick removal of stored content.
