Culture

Here's What You Need to Know About the Vine Camera App

Vine is shutting down, leaving a camera app in its place.

Vine

It’s the big day. Vine closes its doors on Tuesday, with the six-second video looping service switching into archive mode and shutting down. After that point, users will be able to visit old vines through the vine.co site, but it’s the end of the road for a surprisingly creative social network.

The app that uploads the Vines isn’t going away, strictly speaking. It’s instead getting rebranded as Vine Camera, a new update for iOS and Android that retains some of the features that made Vine popular, minus the dedicated social network backend.

From January 17, the app will allow users to record videos of up to 6.5 seconds in length. Afterwards, they can either upload them to Twitter or save them to their camera roll. That’s all, unfortunately: All the other features you’ve come to know and love from Vine, like the network of followers, the messages and the stream of user-uploaded videos, it’s all disappearing.

That doesn’t mean the core essence of Vine is entirely going away, though. Once you’ve created your video and uploaded it to Twitter, if it’s under 6.5 seconds, it will loop on the main site instead. It’s a surprisingly fair compromise, considering that so many Vines were shared around the network through in-tweet embeds, and it could go some way towards satisfying fans that still want to make reactions to new events.

It’s the end of an era for the video sharing service, which boasted over 200 million users and ranked as one of the world’s largest social networks. Vine stars made their mark by producing short, witty takes on daily life, but rivals like Snapchat and Instagram slowly ate away at Vine’s runaway success.

The winning formula that made Vine so popular in the first place has the potential to live on through Twitter, but if it doesn’t, at least we can look through the archives at some of the big hitters that made it so popular in the first place.