Vine got a fatal blow from Twitter a few days back after Twitter's announcement of letting go of their 4-year acquisition of Vine and removal of its 40 employees. Fortunately, animation website Giphy offered Vine loyalists a fresh lease in video sharing life by announcing that users will soon be able to migrate all their video content to their site.
Giphy has yet to announce the specific details on how to migrate or transfer the video content from Vine to Giphy. But Vine fans are given a sliver of hope with this new announcement. While it did not take off to catapulted viral levels as Twitter predicted, Vine has its own set of loyal followers who benefited greatly from the platform.
Not entirely deleted, the Vine website is going to be converted into a digital archive of videos. Technology website Tech Crunch asserts that the digital archive conversion, instead of allowing third-party entities to buy out Vine from Twitter, enables Twitter to preserve embedded 6-second videos from Vine on old tweets from their global users.
Twitter acquired Vine in 2012 for $30 million under the management of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. At the time, social media giant Instagram did not have video capability and Vine's 6-second loop videos were considered a cutting-edge platform. It hit plateau status when it raked in a lot of users and generated its own slew of social media stars in 2013 until Instagram came up with video functionality in its app.
Vine did not meet Dorsey's predictions on continuous viral success and became more of a venue for a creative subset of Vine users. Despite this, Vine's former founder and CEO Dom Hofmann took to Twitter to thank fans of Vine for giving it importance.
now realizing that a lot of people really loved vine. if you did, thank you for using it. it meant the world.
— dom hofmann (@dhof) October 28, 2016
Hofmann was known for his departure right before things went downhill for Vine's fan base. Timed during a crucial point in product development, the leadership change slowed down Vine as other competing apps like Instagram accelerated with their features. Vine fans took to Youtube to provide tributes with best Vine video compilations.
