You will no longer be able to share the best six seconds of your life. This past week Twitter announced that they will discontinue the Vine Mobile app.Essentially shutting down the service. The mobile app is the only way to create new Vines. I was never big on Vine. I actually deleted the app off my phone a few days before the announcement. It seemed like Snap Chat and Instagram eclipsed this service and it never recaptured the magic it once had.
In a blog post on the Vine site, they said this on October 27th.
Since 2013, millions of people have turned to Vine to laugh at loops and see creativity unfold. Today, we are sharing the news that in the coming months we’ll be discontinuing the mobile app.
One of the big questions for Vine creators is what will happen to your Vines? News from the blog post is that the actual Vine site will still be accessible. Meaning, there are no plans to totally shut down the service. This is good news because if you had to move them to another service, you would lose all your followers and view counts. The most ideal thing would be to incorporate them into the creator’s Twitter account. However, this may not be feasible due to budgetary or technological issues.
They will be working with creators to answer any questions they may have regarding the Vines they have created. It sounds like they don’t want to ruin any work that has already been created and value the creators who participated on Vine over the years. If they can’t roll them over to Twitter, they will create an easy way to export the files. Similar to what Google has done with Google Take-out.
What does this mean for you?
If you aren’t in the Vine ecosystem, nothing. If you are this could impact your marketing in a big way. Especially if you were all in on Vine. Now is the time to look at alternatives. The two that come to mind are Instagram (Stories and Video) and Snap Chat. If you want something similar I would recommend Instagram. It’s super easy to use. It’s no longer limited to 15 seconds. You can go up to 60 seconds. However, you can make videos of any length.
As I stated above, it is unknown on the future of the content. I will keep you posted on any updates.
