Vine still lives, according to co creator Dom Hofmann. The entrepreneur, who’s been working on and off on a successor of the video app, says the proper sequel will be called Byte, and it’s coming in spring 2019.
Twitter initially purchased Vine in 2012, before its official launch, and shut it down roughly four years later. Despite its short-lived existence, Vine became a hugely popular platform for video creators, many of whom have since moved on to Instagram, Twitch, and YouTube. In Vine’s place, TikTok, from a Chinese company coincidentally known as ByteDance, has risen to inherit the short-form video torch, albeit with a lot of cringe worthy lip-sync content.
Now there is not much else is known about how Byte will work, but Hofmann says it is officially the project formerly known as v2, which had a publicized and transparent development process with dedicated fan forums for around six months starting last November.
Hofmann postponed v2 indefinitely in May of this year, citing funding and logistic issues, as well as his day job running an immersive entertainment studio called Innerspace VR. Hofmann kept the forums open to keep discussion going, and it seems like he’s now squared away some type of funding to get v2 off the ground as Byte. We’ll likely hear more soon, but it’s just a relief to hear it’s actually happening and that the six-second videos that shaped modern internet culture could be coming back in a big way.
