Vine Launches and Defines the Loop

2013

Date: 24 January 2013 · Place: New York; acquired by Twitter October 2012 · Figures: Dom Hofmann, co-founder · Rus Yusupov, co-founder · Colin Kroll, co-founder · Twitter, acquirer · Tags: Platform, Vine, Format 01. Six Seconds, Looping Twitter ships Vine on 24 January 2013, four months after acquiring the company from Hofmann, Yusupov, and Kroll for thirty million dollars. The constraint is brutal: six-second clips, autoplay, infinite loop, no skipping. Within a year the constraint produces a wholly new comedic form. Setup and punchline collapse into a single gesture; the loop turns repetition into rhythm. Vine Stars Thomas Sanders, King Bach, Lele Pons, and Brittany Furlan accumulate audiences in the tens of millions. 02. Twitter Kills It Twitter announces Vine's shutdown on 27 October 2016 amid an inability to monetize. The app remains live through January 2017; the archive stays online as an artifact through 2019. Vine's grammar migrates wholesale to TikTok when ByteDance launches it internationally in September 2017. Half the canonical TikTok moves are direct Vine descendants. Sources • Twitter blog, 'Introducing Vine', 24 January 2013 • Casey Newton, The Verge, 'Why Vine died', 28 October 2016 • KnowYourMeme entry, 'Vine'