Spent most of today doing something I did not expect to be doing on a Sunday in November: sitting on the couch, laptop balanced on a pillow, manually saving forty-some six-second videos off Vine one at a time before the whole thing goes dark.
Twitter announced back on October 27th that it's killing the app. Not immediately. You can still post, still scroll, still watch loops of skateboard fails and that one kid falling into a pool for a little while longer, but the writing's on the wall. They're keeping the website up so people can look at old Vines later, which is nice I guess, but nice in the way a museum is nice. You go look at the thing behind glass. You don't get to keep it.
So I went digging through my own account and honestly forgot how many of these I made. Forty-seven, turns out. Most of them are garbage, I'll be upfront about that: my cat knocking a mug off the counter, filmed three different times because I kept missing the moment. A really bad one of me trying to do a loop transition with a coffee cup that just looks like the cup teleporting. But a couple are ones I actually care about. There's one from a friend's wedding in 2014, just six seconds of the room laughing at something the best man said, and I don't have that footage anywhere else. That's the one that got me to actually sit down and do this instead of putting it off.
Here's my gripe, and it's a real one: there is no bulk export. None. Google gives you Takeout and you get a zip file with basically everything you've ever touched. Vine gives you a grid of thumbnails and you click each one, hit download, wait, rename the file because it saves as some string of numbers, repeat. Forty-seven times. I've seen a couple of third-party tools floating around that promise to grab your whole archive at once but I wasn't about to hand my Twitter login to some rando's website two weeks before an app shutdown, so I did it the slow way.
What gets me about the whole situation is that Vine was actually good at something specific: the loop, the six-second limit forcing you to think about a joke or a moment instead of just rambling into a camera. And Twitter never figured out how to make that into a business. Instagram added video, Snapchat ate the casual short-clip space, and Vine just kind of sat there being the format everyone loved and nobody at the company seemed to know what to do with. I don't think that's really Vine's fault. I think that's a company that bought something in 2012 and then never really committed to it. It's the same energy as when a band gets bought by a label and the label just doesn't promote the record.
There were people who made actual careers out of six-second videos: Nash Grier, King Bach, that whole ecosystem of comedians who figured out the format faster than most TV people ever will. A lot of them had already jumped to YouTube before this announcement, which honestly tells you something about how this was going even before last month.
Anyway. If you made anything on Vine you actually like, don't wait. I don't know the exact date the app stops functioning entirely, they've been vague about it, just "coming months," which is the kind of phrase that means less time than you'd hope. Go grab your stuff this week, not next month. I finished my forty-seven around six tonight, and I'm annoyed at how long it took for something that should've been a five-minute export.
Small unrelated complaint while I was at it: my internet was crawling the entire time I was doing this because someone in this house was apparently streaming something in 4K in the next room, and downloading forty-seven tiny video files should not have taken ninety minutes but here we are. Comcast, if you're reading this, do better.
That wedding Vine is backed up now, at least. Six seconds, saved twice — once on my laptop, once on an external drive, because I've learned that lesson before with a dead hard drive and about a thousand photos I'll never see again.