The revival of Vine on Twitter has been the talk of the town, as Elon Musk officially took over as owner and acting CEO and has since made hastily strategic plans public. Having a controversial initiation day and rocky start, Musk left no time to waste to fire top executives and set demanding deadlines for employees to meet before November 7th for Twitter Blue Subscribers’ paid verification accounts.
The new motto of Twitter’s company culture since the takeover by Musk is, “get it done or get out!” Leaving many employees scrambling to fulfill strenuous demands and newly implemented strategies in a suspenseful short period to prevent any more job cuts.
In an ambitious attempt to become the most used free speech conversation platform, Musk sets his vision even further to dominate the creative content sector as well by having sparked conversations online contemplating whether to bring back Vine.
Vine is a short-form video application that Twitter acquired in 2012 that let users take 6-second videos which would run on a loop. Unfortunately in 2016, the video service was shut down and abandoned before TikTok made the format the most desirable content creation method in the world.
Elon Musk tests public perceptibility for the revival of TikTok’s predecessor, Vine
After firing top executives on Friday last week, Musk took to Twitter over the weekend to tweet his brainstorming ideas about where he wants to take Twitter. Most of the signals offered conflicting signals doing little to allay fears that hate speech and misinformation will flourish under new his new rules.
In his attempt to revive Twitter’s declining relevancy on social media and turn around yearly losses of $221 million, Musk has been handed the biggest microphone in the world and plans with his army of cult followers to achieve this goal by expanding into creative social platforms to attract younger users that go beyond Twitter as a platform for just conversations.
Bring back Vine?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022
One of his brainstorming tweets was a poll about Vine, with nearly 70% of respondents voting in favour of bringing it back. The receptive responses were even supported by former Vine stars such as Zach King, who commented with a heart emoji, and Lele Pons who retweeted Musk and wrote: “Yes, please @elonmusk. Do it!!!”
The possibility to revive Vine comes at a time when other social media platforms are scrambling to keep users on their platforms to prevent them from switching to TikTok. Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat have all introduced their own cloned versions of TikTok’s short video formats but cannot come close to the creative tools and impeccable algorithm which TikTok provides.
But as Vine is a predecessor and godfather of pioneering short video content, it would only be a revival with updated improvements to a platform most users are already familiar with. Allowing them to stay true to the app’s initial values and brand identity without causing confusion among users for what purpose the platform is to be used like Instagram has seen a public backlash to “make Instagram, Instagram again.”
Musk also solicited ideas about how to make a revived Vine better than TikTok. “What could we do to make it better than TikTok?” he wrote in response to Jimmy Donaldson, the biggest social media star and YouTuber creator known as MrBeast who replied to the initial poll writing: “If you did that and actually competed with TikTok that’d be hilarious.”
If you did that and actually competed with tik tok that’d be hilarious
— MrBeast (@MrBeast) October 31, 2022
What would the revival of Vine mean?
Rus Yusupov, a Vine co-founder, has tweeted that Vine failed because it didn’t build the right features in time as the platform didn’t help creators make money, and didn’t embrace lip-sync videos as a trend the way TikTok has.
With Musk on board and ferociously leading the way, the possible revival with the right features that make creative content creation attractive to businesses and creators shows the breath of product ideas – including old ones – that Musk is toying with in his first week heading up Twitter.
As we wait in anticipation to know if Vine will make a come-back we expect big things from Elon Musk as he is known to surpass expectations and deliver on his word with business ventures.
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