By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO (AA) – Twitter announced Thursday that it end the popular video sharing service Vine, a company that allows users to post looping, six-second videos.
The app will disappear in the “coming months”, Twitter said in a statement. An initial round of layoffs began Thursday at Vine, although specifics were not disclosed. While all the Vine videos on the service will remain online for now, the company’s statement hinted that the files would likely be removed at some point.
“We value you, your Vines, and are going to do this the right way,” Twitter and Vine said in a joint statement. “You’ll be able to access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made. You will be notified before we make any changes to the app or website.”
Vine was purchased in 2012 by Twitter for $30 million before the app officially launched. The service soared in popularity after it was released in 2013, joining start-ups like Snapchat as the leaders of a second generation of social networks.
The repeating, extremely short nature of Vine videos were trendy for a few years after its launch, but the popularity of a similar video platform from image-sharing service Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, cut deeply into Vine’s ascendance.
Eventually, Vine co-founders Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll all left Twitter, and the microblogging social media site was extremely slow to update or improve the service.
According to Vine, approximately 39 million videos have been posted and the service has around 200 million monthly active users.
The news regarding Vine’s shutdown came alongside Twitter’s quarterly earnings report, which revealed another quarter of slowing revenue for the struggling social media website.
It said the company would slash 9 percent of its global workforce, or about 350 employees. It did not say how many of those layoffs would affect Vine staff compared to other workers.
