By NATALIE VILLARREAL, Ranger Reporter:
Many millennials around the nation are devastated that Vine is now being taken away from all app stores. Vine was founded in June 2012 and acquired through Twitter in June 2013 for a reported $30 million. The app then went to launch Jan. 24, 2013, as a free app in the Apple App Store, and later launched in the Android App Store that June.
Vine is an app that allows you to take a six second-long looping video clip to share with other users.
Although Vine was booming in social media, other apps started to spark more interest, and many people stopped using Vine in favor of Snapchat, Instagram and Flickr.
On Oct. 27, 2016, Twitter announced that it would be taking Vine down due to the lack of followers and users on the app. This hit what was left of the Vine community hard, and many old Vine users began to upload videos saying their goodbyes.
Twitter did confirm that even with the discontinuation of Vine, the app and website will still be available for users to view and download, but they will no longer be able to post on the app.
Luckily for me, I was one of the users that still participated in the app. Vine was the app I checked before I went to bed because of the hilarious videos I found.
Some of my favorite Viners were Riley Hunt, Zack Hall, David Bass, Mark Mathias, Cody Persinger and Trevor Holmes. I loved the variety of Vines, and especially that they had a “popular now” tab. They also offered a number of other categories to keep people interested.
Vine was one of the rather short-lived social media apps in my life, but it was by far one of my favorites. Although I did stop using Vine as much as I did other apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, I would check it occasionally.
Personally, I felt that Vine was lacking in some advancement issues. Some of the features were old while other apps had newer things going on. When Instagram introduced the video feature on their app, I personally forgot about Vine because of the distraction.
Then Snapchat had the filters and Vine had yet to get any new features.
To keep the momentum going, Vine developers decided to extend the videos with the option to go over a minute, but I didn’t feel this was useful.
Eventually the only time I would get on Vine was if one of my favorites posted a video and it notified me–which was not very often since even the uploading users stopped using the social media app, resulting in the fans ending their usage of Vine as well.
I must admit it was a great app, but unfortunately the app lacked in some features, which contributed to its demise.
Rest in peace Vine, you will be missed. Maybe not, but it was worth a shot. Who knows, maybe all this attention will spark a comeback?
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