Two weeks ago Twitter announced that it would be discontinuing its mobile app Vine, the six second looping video service that was founded in 2012 and was purchased by Twitter for a reported $30 million dollars that same year. Originally created so users could capture casual moments in their own lives and share them with friends and family, it was no surprise to co-founder Dom Hofmann who stated after the sale that ‘it immediately became clear that vine culture was going to shift towards creativity and entertainment’.

Ian Padgham a member of Twitter’s 2012 marketing team responsible for the purchase of Vine felt the six second video feature was the key and forced users to be creative in how they could tell a story. Padgham expressed his love for Vines simplicity and ease by stating 'it’s kinda like Microsoft Paint. it used to be the worst app, but you couldn’t get distracted by the bells and whistles'.

In 2013, Vine began allowing users to record clips with their phones front facing cameras and usage of the app blew up. A community of young users sprung up around the service and within a short space of time the internet was bombarded with six second clips, the internet became home for a new social community with its own celebrities called Viners. Vine was growing rapidly and its 'stars' were becoming more and more popular by the day, physical comic Amanda Cermy earned more than 2.2 billion views while Logan Paul’s vines looped more than 4 billion times.

Although on the outside Vine was seen as a one of the more popular social media apps, on the inside it rarely looked stable. In 2014, two years after its purchase the three co-founders of Vine had all left or been let go by Twitter. Firstly, Dom Hofmann left to pursue other ventures and was later followed by Colin Kroll, while Rus Yusupov who was then Vine’s creative director was let go to save money. Jason Toff who took over from Yusupov in 2014, recently left Vine to work on Google’s virtual reality project. The executive conveyor belt in such a short amount of time certainly didn’t help matters with Vine, and a number of employees have expressed frustration with the lack of guidance and balance from higher ups within the company.

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