Elon Musk Says He’s Bringing Back Vine’s Archive
Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), has announced that the company has discovered the video archive for the popular short-form video app Vine, which was previously thought to be lost. X is reportedly working on restoring user access to this extensive collection of clips.
Vine, a platform known for its six-second looping videos and considered an early precursor to platforms like TikTok, was acquired by Twitter in October 2012 for $30 million. The acquisition aimed to bolster Twitter’s video capabilities. However, despite its initial promise, Twitter eventually decided to shut down Vine in 2016, ceasing new uploads, and fully discontinued the app in 2017. A user archive did remain accessible for a period thereafter.
Despite its discontinuation, Vine continues to hold a significant place in internet culture. Compilations of popular Vines on platforms like YouTube and the subsequent careers of many creators who gained fame on Vine have kept the platform’s legacy alive, introducing its content to new generations.
Musk himself expressed interest in reviving Vine shortly after acquiring Twitter in October 2022. He conducted a poll on X asking users if they wanted Vine to return, with nearly 70% voting in favor. At the time, Axios reported that Twitter had allocated some engineers to work on a Vine reboot, though no concrete developments emerged.
In his recent announcement, Musk also highlighted Grok’s new video-creation feature, Grok Imagine, available to X Premium+ subscribers, describing it as “AI Vine.” This suggests a potential shift in focus from human creativity to AI-driven content generation for video creation. It remains to be seen whether the restoration of the Vine archive is a genuine effort to bring back nostalgic content or a strategy to draw attention to X’s new AI capabilities.
