So this happened sometime last week and I almost missed it entirely: Vine isn't Vine anymore. As of around January 17th, the app on my phone just... stopped letting me post anything. You open it, you can still record a six-second loop, but there's no button to actually put it anywhere. Twitter turned it into "Vine Camera," a weird, hollowed-out little app that lets you shoot a clip and then export it somewhere else, like Twitter itself. The old videos are still up at vine.co if you go looking, archived like a museum exhibit nobody asked to visit.
I know Twitter announced back in October that Vine was getting the axe, so this isn't exactly breaking news. But there's a difference between "we are discontinuing this app" as a press release and the actual day the lights go out, and I don't think enough people clocked that the second thing already happened.
Can we talk for a second about how much dumb, perfect stuff came out of that app? "Road work ahead? I sure hope it does." The chicken attack song. That kid going "why you always lying, always lying" over the Nicki Minaj beat. Zach King doing his little disappearing magic tricks. None of that fits anywhere else. Instagram video clips run too long and feel like a production. Musical.ly, which is basically the app that ate Vine's lunch before Twitter even pulled the plug, is mostly lip syncing. Vine had this specific comedic rhythm that only worked because you had six seconds and a loop and nothing else. You couldn't pad it. A joke either landed in that window or it was just embarrassing, there was no room to fake it.
My honest opinion, and I said something close to this back in October too: Twitter never had a real plan for Vine, and this is Twitter admitting it in the most anticlimactic way possible. They bought the company in 2012, before it had even launched, for something like $30 million, and then mostly let it sit there while Instagram and Snapchat ate around the edges for four years. There was no creator payout program until it was already too late (they floated one right around the time they announced the shutdown, which tells you everything). Never any real push to make Vine loops embed well outside of Twitter's own feed. I use Twitter every single day and I still think it's a company that's bad at finishing things it starts.
Anyway, I went and pulled my own Vine archive last night because apparently you can still do that through the app before it presumably vanishes for good at some point down the line. I had eleven vines. Eleven, total, across four years. Most of them are just my old apartment, a couple are my dog messing around in the yard, and one is genuinely just me failing at a cinemagraph thing on the fourth attempt. A deeply unimpressive body of work. But I'm still glad I have it, because that dumb little window is basically the only video I've got of my dog when she was still a puppy, and there's something both funny and sad about a dead app being the reason that footage exists at all.
I don't think Vine's death is the biggest tech story of the week by a long shot, there was obviously a lot else going on the last couple of days that had nothing to do with apps. But it's the kind of thing that's easy to shrug off in the moment and then go looking for later and find it's just gone. If you had a Vine account and you actually liked any of your own stuff, go grab the export now while the option is still there. Don't assume "eventually" is going to hold still long enough for you to get around to it.