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It was an app that allowed users to further showcase their creativity and talents through video-even if for six seconds. This was not just another platform that allowed everyday users a chance to gain millions of views and followers (and, for the ultra-successful users, a chance at million-dollar contracts). This was also around the time when becoming famous through social media was a new-ish concept. Vine essentially provided a platform that allowed users to create their own GIFs with audio that played on a loop. Keep in mind, this was back in the day when GIFs had brand-new, explosive popularity. And this creative experimentation happened as early as its beta testing phase and continued to carry on throughout its popularity as a cultural phenomenon. Instead, video creators took the six-second limitation as a creative challenge.
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This was their pitch to Twitter, who saw the video creation company as the perfect pairing to their microblogging social media platform. Vine’s founders envisioned the video loop app as a way for users to capture casual six-second moments in their lives and share them with friends. It launched as a free app in 2013, first for iOS, then for Android and then for Windows devices by mid-November. Vine was founded in June 2012 by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll and acquired by Twitter in October 2012 for $30 million. Vine was a short-form video hosting service that allowed users to share six-minute, looping video clips. So, whatever happened to Vine? Why was Vine a thing? How did Vine work? And why did Vine ultimately fail? What is Vine? It was the social media platform manifestation of the Internet challenge-before the Internet challenge was a thing.
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It was an online phenomenon that pushed the limits of creativity through its restrictions of time. Before the days of TikTok and Snapchat, there was Vine.
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