Amateur internet comedians and short-form video enthusiasts, rejoice: Vine looks like its coming back from the dead.
Dom Hoffman, founder of the popular six-second video app, teased a potential Vine rebirth via Twitter on Wednesday, with a simple “v2” tweet and accompanying logo.
Vine diehards were hit with a gut punch earlier this year, when Twitter shuttered the video app in January. Founded in 2012, the app was quickly gobbled up by Twitter for a cool $30 million, and launched in early 2013. Vine quickly became an internet hitmaker, with several videos taking on a meme-life-of-their-own. One obvious example: “What are those?!” Here, go down memory lane one more time:
While Vine was once a trailblazing app — launching before powerhouses like Facebook and Instagram jumped headlong into the video space — Twitter was unable to leverage its popularity. Running ads against six-second clips and pulling in revenue wasn’t in the cards for Vine.
There isn’t much else beyond Hoffman’s appropriately brief tweets on Vine 2.0, but we’ll have our eyes peeled on it heading into 2018.
6 Tech Giants Shaking Up News, From Jeff Bezos to Laurene Powell Jobs (Photos)
Tech leaders are increasingly intertwined with the news business. While some want to support old properties, one set out to destroy a new one. Here they are.
Jeff Bezos – Washington Post
The Amazon founder purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million in cash. President Trump has called the paper the “Amazon Washington Post.”
The Facebook co-founder purchased The New Republic in 2012, becoming executive chairman and publisher. However, he sold the venerable political magazine to Win McCormack in 2016, saying he "underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate."
The eBay founder is a well-known philanthropist who created First Look Media, a journalism venture behind The Intercept. Inspired by Edward Snowden's leaks. Omidyar teamed up with journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras to launch the website “dedicated to the kind of reporting those disclosures required: fearless, adversarial journalism.”
The PayPal co-founder doesn’t own a news organization, but he makes this list because he essentially ended one -- Gawker -- proving once again the power of an angry billionaire. Thiel secretly bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s sex-tape lawsuit against Gawker Media because he was upset that the website once outed him as gay. Hogan won the defamation lawsuit against the site that sent its parent company into bankruptcy, and Gawker.com is no longer operating.
OK, so Facebook isn’t technically a news organization… yet. However, the company is preparing to launch its much-anticipated lineup of original content later this summer, and there are also signs that it's on the verge of becoming an even bigger media platform.
Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships at Facebook, confirmed last week it’s developing a subscription service for publishers willing to post articles directly to Facebook Instant Articles, rather than their native websites.
Tech is increasingly intertwined with news, for better or worse
Tech leaders are increasingly intertwined with the news business. While some want to support old properties, one set out to destroy a new one. Here they are.