With reports suggesting that billionaire Elon Musk, the new Twitter CEO is attempting to monetise Twitter's blue tick or verification feature, the company is also looking to reboot looping video app Vine this year, the media has reported. This is big considering the fact that Vine can take on TikTok (banned in India) and other short video platforms.
Musk has instructed Twitter engineers to work on a Vine reboot that could be ready by year-end, claims a report by Axios citing multiple sources.
Way before short video platforms like TikTok, Tiki and Reels by Instagram became popular, Vine short video app had invoked a lot of interest from Twitter users before fading into oblivion. Twitter had acquired Vine in 2012.
According to the Axios report, Twitter teams already have been assigned to look at Vine's old code base, which hasn't been changed or updated since the shutdown. Twitter had pulled the plug on Vine in 2016 and introduced new video features.
The self-styled 'Chief Twit' also posted a yes/no poll to his followers and asked: “Bring back Vine?”. According to the poll results, 69 per cent voted in favour of bringing back Vine to the platform.
Meanwhile, Musk who dissolved Twitter’s board of directors last week and became the "sole director of Twitter" has called the move “temporary”. In response to a post by a journalist for Tesmanian.com Eva Fox, Musk tweeted, “This is just temporary”.
According to the securities filing, all previous members of Twitter's board, including former CEO Parag Agrawal and former chairman Bret Taylor, are no longer directors "in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement".
Last week, after Musk completed his $44-billion deal to acquire the microblogging site, he fired CEO Agrawal, legal executive Vijaya Gadde, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, and General Counsel Sean Edgett. He had earlier accused them of misleading him about the number of fake accounts on the platform.