Vine

Vine let anyone hold a finger on the screen and record, one touch at a time, until six seconds had accumulated — then looped the result forever. Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll built it in mid-2012; Twitter bought the company about four months later, before the app had even launched publicly. When it shipped on iOS in January 2013, the format was instantly legible and instantly viral: comedy, dance, whip-pans, the loop itself as punchline. By December 2015 Vine claimed more than 200 million active users and had minted a cohort of young creators who would go on to careers built entirely on six-second timing.

Twitter never worked out how to keep them there. Creators left for YouTube and Instagram, where money and audience reach were larger; Twitter offered neither a real payout structure nor sustained product investment. On October 27, 2016, Twitter announced it would stop accepting new uploads to the Vine app. By January 17, 2017, the shutdown was complete — except the app icon didn’t disappear. It was repurposed into “Vine Camera,” a recorder with no feed and no community, and Twitter spun up a separate read-only “Vine Archive” of old clips on January 20, 2017 (itself killed in April 2018). Neither was Vine; both were its afterimage.

Three years later, co-founder Dom Hofmann built Byte from scratch — new company, new code, none of Vine’s old accounts or clips carried over. It launched January 24, 2020, to modest attention and folded a few years after that. By then TikTok had already taken the six-second loop, scaled it past a billion users, and made Vine’s format the default grammar of a much bigger platform it had no hand in building. The app that invented the loop didn’t survive long enough to watch someone else profit from it at scale.