Vine, the six-second looping-video app that propelled some of the digital age’s biggest names to stardom, nudged the internet towards the in-jokey meme-filled world it is today and made it really easy to see dodgily-filmed footage of goals from Turkish football matches, has been missed since closing down two years ago.
There was a reasonable amount of terrible rubbish on it (like Logan Paul and his brotastic ilk), but for the most part its limited duration and strictly in-app filming forced users to be really creative, resulting in some incredibly ingenious stuff, like the digital magic of Zach King:
The months-long “transformation” of Connor O’Malley, in which, over the course of hundreds of Vines, he degenerates into a screaming, shrieking monster (skip to twelve or so minutes in):
Short but beautiful films, like Avery Monsen’s “It’s A Beautiful Day”:
Will Sasso’s endless lemon misadventures:
And a reasonable amount of, just, nonsense:
It was good though, honest! Competition from Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, as well as Twitter itself, led to it shutting down in October 2016. Its cofounders went on to do different things - one started HQ Trivia, but one, Dom Hoffman, has repeatedly mentioned a followup app to Vine that would work in the same way. There was a version underway for a while that was going to be called v2, but that ended up being abandoned earlier this year.
However, Hoffman has announced that v2 lives again, under a new name, Byte:
Not a huge amount more has been released about the app, though in the v2 days the story was that videos could range from 2 seconds to 6.5 seconds. Spring 2019 isn’t far off though - stardom awaits!
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(Pic: Vine)
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