Working a continent apart from their parent company, Vine’s small, New York-based team struggled to grow its user base or find ways to make money. Interviews with seven former executives reveal a portrait of a company whose cultural impact far outstripped its strategic benefits to Twitter. And while existing Vines will remain on the web, a media format that had become beloved for its versatility now appears headed the way of Betamax. With its own future increasingly uncertain, Twitter said it would shut down Vine’s mobile app some time in the next few months. On Thursday, the experimentation came to an end. “Watching the community and the tool push on each other was exciting and unreal, and almost immediately it became clear that Vine’s culture was going to shift towards creativity and experimentation.” “It immediately became clear that Vine’s culture was going to shift towards creativity.” “It became pretty clear as soon after we launched,” Hofmann said. Instead it became something wilder - and much more culturally interesting. Within weeks, it appeared that Vine probably would never become the everyday video sharing tool its founders had envisioned. “Our original beta had something like 10 or 15 people on it, and even with that small group we started to see experimentation pretty early on.”

“It was surprising,” said Dom Hofmann, who founded Vine with Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll four months before Twitter bought it. Something about that loop - the way a Vine endlessly rewound itself after completing, like a GIF with audio - encouraged people to put the app to strange uses. It was part of their pitch to Twitter, which bought the company for a reported $30 million in October 2012, seeing it as a near-perfect video analog to its flagship app’s short-form text posts.Īnd yet even before the app launched, users had taken the 6-second constraint as a creative challenge.

Its founders had envisioned their tool for making 6-second clips as a way to help people capture casual moments in their lives and share them with friends. The thing about Vine becoming the internet’s premier tool for making short-form videos is that it happened almost completely by accident.

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