Time for Vine 2.0?

On January 24th, 2013, Twitter introduced Vine. It quickly became an Internet sensation, earning the position of most downloaded and popular free application of 2013.

Vine was a video sharing application that allowed users to upload brief six-second videos that continuously looped and share them either publicly or customized to be viewable to themselves solely. With more than 200 million monthly active users, there was no doubt that this app was one that loved and utilized by the mass of mobile phone-owners.

But beginning in October of 2016, news surfaced that Twitter would be discontinuing Vine. Earlier this year, on January 17th, the app was official shut down. Considering the large success and popularity the application initially enjoyed in earlier years, many question why Twitter had put an end to Vine.

With the new innovations of Instagram, Snapchat, and other similar apps and platforms competing against it in the social media market, Vine could not keep up, and therefore had to shut down. It was not able to maintain its user-count when there were so many other rivaling applications and their newest upgrades; this begs the question, will Vine 2 be able to prove others wrong and not fall into the same path as its predecessor?

The second Vine was first announced in late November, and the creator (who is one of the three original founders of the first Vine) teased the logo of the upcoming application at the beginning of this month, on December 6th, 2017. Since then, many have been in anticipation of the revived app.

YeJin Hwang, junior at Valencia High School, says, “I remember enjoying and laughing at Vines with my friends back in 2013 and 2014. Those years were the years that Vine really started to kick off and many Vine stars gained huge popularity. I am excited to see what is in store for the new Vine and whether or not it will reach or even surpass the popularity that the original app had.”

Being that the highly-anticipated app is still in its beginning stages and has just been recently announced not much information or details have been released. However, there is a lot of controversy and clashing opinions revolving Vine 2. Many loyal fans of the first Vine are especially excited by the news of Vine 2. They hope for sequels, upgraded versions, and remakes of their most beloved and the most popular vines. Others dread the comeback of certain Vine stars, such as the infamous Magcon Boys.

Until Vine 2’s release sometime in 2018, we should just stick with the numerous Vine compilations that have been uploaded in memory of the original’s shutdown.