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With Vine revival, is Twitter owner Elon Musk gearing to take on TikTok?
Days after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk ran a poll on the social media platform he owns now. “Bring back Vine?” he asked his followers.
Before TikTok videos and Instagram reels captured our smartphones and gave rise to countless influencers, you could make short Vine videos. To refresh your memory, Vine was acquired by 2012, and the short-form video app was extremely popular and had given a lot of internet stars before fading into oblivion.
Days after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk ran a poll on the social media platform he owns now. “Bring back Vine?” he asked his followers. And the results are outstanding, with 69 per cent of the 4.92 million votes calling for Vine to make a comeback.
Musk has reportedly told the engineers at Twitter to work on Vine rebott which could be ready by year end, news website Axios reported. They have been assigned to look at the app's old code base, which hasn't been changed or updated since the shutdown in 2016. In fact, the website reported that Musk had discussed Vines months before he completed the buyout.
A Bloomberg report stated that several Twitter employees have volunteered to work on the Vine project with a hope that joining the effort Musk is excited about might help them in keeping their jobs.
Musk even asked his followers,"What could we do to make it better than TikTok?"
Challenges
However, there are several challenges awaiting the Vine revival.
The product has been built on an old code which can no longer communicate with Twitter's current systems and would likely need to be rewritten.
A major difference between TikTok and Vine lies in the fact while the former uses an algorithm, the latter depended on user's social follows.
