Tag Archive for: Vine videos

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Not all that long ago, Vine was one of the fastest growing social apps on the market. The app made its name with short looping videos and a large community that took advantage of the medium to create comedy and even frights.

Since being acquired by Twitter, however, the app has gradually lost its place in the social world as other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat have incorporated their own video features. So, perhaps it is unsurprising that Vine has announced it will be ceasing operations and shutting down in the near future.

According to a post shared on Medium, the website and app for vine will remain online so that users will have time to download their Vines and mourn the loss of the app as a community.

The statement didn’t give any firm timeline of when Vine will fully shut its doors, or any explanation as to why Twitter has decided to shutter the app. It is possible Twitter could possibly choose to integrate the app capabilities entirely within its own platform, but so far the company hasn’t made any indication that it plans to do so.

Back in 2012, shortly after it was bought out by Twitter, Vine was sitting as the number 1 app on the iTunes app store and had a consistent 200 million active users. However, the rise of live video and new video features on competing platforms have pushed Vine out of the crowd. According to data from App Annie, Vine is currently sitting at number 284 in the iTunes app store charts for free apps.

Analysis also suggests year-over-year worldwide downloads of the Vine app have been consistently declining across both the Apple App Store and Google Play.

For what it’s worth, Vine co-founder Rus Yusupov only tweet in the wake of the news suggests he regrets letting Twitter take over the company.

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The magic number for Twitter appears to be 140. The social network built its platform around 140 character tweets, and now it is taking a similar approach with its video service by limiting videos to 140 seconds, according to a recent announcement.

Twitter has allowed users to share videos on its network since last year, but the videos have been limited to 30-seconds maximum until now. The only exception was for a select number of advertisers who could post videos up to 10 minutes long. Now, users are getting a taste of that creative freedom with videos that go slightly beyond 2 minutes long.

The change will also be having an impact on the Twitter-owned Vine, which is known for looping 6-second-long micro-videos. Now, Vines can be used to preview or promote twitter videos which can be viewed by clicking the new “Watch more” button.

According to the company’s announcement, video tweets have gone up by over 50% since the start of this year and these new changes will allow more flexibility for users.

Along with this news, Twitter also announced that iOS and Android users are getting a new viewing mode which shows Vines or Twitter videos in a full-screen mode along with suggested videos.