Elon Musk recently announced that he is bringing back Vine’s archives, after teasing the social platform’s return over the past week or so. The owner of X says that the company recently discovered the entire video archive of the once-popular short video app and is working to restore user access to it. Twitter bought Vine back in 2012.
Musk says that X users will be able to publish these Vines, but it’s just an archive. In other words, it doesn’t sound like a renaissance of the platform itself.
It remains unclear what Musk’s intentions are for the brand, but the announcement of the archive’s return was accompanied by an advertisement for Grok Imagine, a video creation platform. He called the service “AI Vine”. Why waste energy on creating short content when you can type a few words into a prompt box?
And then there’s Elon Musk. He doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to keeping his promises. We’ll just have to wait and see if Vine’s video archive returns and what happens after that.
For the uninitiated, Vine was something like TikTok before TikTok. It was a platform for 6-second looping videos. For a while, the app was extremely popular, but after buying it for $30 million, Twitter failed to utilize it. In 2016, it was shut down, which led to a halt in downloads, and in 2017, it stopped working entirely.
