Musk wants to revive Vine

Elon Musk wants to bring back Vine (and polled users agree)

The rumour mill and shakeup surrounding Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition continues to churn. This time around, Twitter's new owner wants to bring back its looping video app Vine. Axios cites multiple sources that Musk has ordered engineers at the company to reboot Vine before the year ends. He's tasked engineers to look at the app's old code base, which hasn't been maintained or updated since the service shut down in 2016.

According to one source, this would need "a lot of work." A tweet from a former Vine staffer, Sara Beykpour, advises it would be better for them to start over. And it is sound advice with possible API changes, security concerns, and other elements that need maintenance. 

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Vine isn’t making a comeback in the immediate future

If you’ve been waiting for Vine 2.0 to happen, you might have to wait for an “indefinite” amount of time. Vine co-creator Dom Hoffman shared the announcement on v2app Twitter account about postponing the release of the new app. Some of the big reasons he cited include the legal fees and other expenses needed to get the project off the ground. And since that would require external funding, investors wouldn’t be happy with Hoffman splitting his time with Vine 2 and his other startup project, which he says he’s started on already. However, Hoffman assures people they aren’t completely abandoning the return of Vine but it might take a long time for it to pick right back up.

Bug exposed email addresses and phone numbers of Vine users

It looks like shutting down the service isn’t the worst thing to happen to Vine. Vine’s owner Twitter has started sending out a mass email to Vine users alerting them that a “bug,” which they say was “immediately fixed,” briefly let third parties see email addresses and phone numbers linked to Vine accounts. But they don’t make any mention of passwords being compromised. They did want to emphasize the window also lasted “less than 24 hours.”

If you’re notified that means you might have been affected. But it also doesn’t mean that your information has been misused. What Vine warns about is being suspicious of any emails or messages from unknown senders. And reminds its users that “Vine will only send communications from @twitter.com, and we will never send emails with attachments or request your password by email.”

Source: Vine on Medium

Vine to become Vine Camera when app shuts down

While Twitter hasn’t said yet how long the site will be up and running, the social network is already making adjustments to how Vine’s feature will be used in the future. The app will be rebranded as Vine Camera and will let you take looping 6.5-second video clips that you can post either on Twitter or save directly into your phone. Outside of that, you won’t be able to do the other things you could with the previous Vine app.

If you don’t plan on using Vine anymore and just want to get your videos, you’ll get different results depending on whether you save from the desktop site or smartphone app. With the desktop site you’ll get index.html file that has your captions as well as number of likes, comments, and revines. If you get it from the app, you’ll just get the video files. You can also get an email with links to your Vines if getting everything seems too troublesome for you. This download bundle won’t include the longer video clips Vine experimented on before. Followers are also being transitioned to Twitter with users being alerted via pop-ups they want to keep following well-known video creators there.

Source: The Verge