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Twitter Media

Twitter is Shutting Down Its Video App Vine (recode.net) 59

Posted by msmash from the killing-things dept.
Twitter's plan to refocus on its core business consists of laying off 9 percent of its staff, and also killing off Vine. The company announced today that it will shut down Vine's video app in the coming months. From a Recode report: Vine has been struggling for some time, so Thursday's move is surprising but not unbelievable. The app was never a revenue driver for the company, and it was no longer growing. Many of its top executives left over the spring and early summer. What's interesting is that Twitter is shutting the app down instead of trying to sell it off. Or perhaps it did try and simply couldn't find a buyer (like a buyer for itself). Either way, Vine will soon shut down. The company says that users will be able to download their Vine videos before that happens, but there has been no specific timetable announced. Vine general manager Hannah Davis, who just joined the company this spring, will stay on to oversee the transition, according to a spokesperson.
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Twitter is Shutting Down Its Video App Vine More

Twitter is Shutting Down Its Video App Vine

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  • Unlike Twitter itself, which has been making money hand over fist.

    Oh, wait--

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Must admit I'm baffled by the uproar on Twitter.

        Twitter is pretty good at brewing tempests in teapots. Surely it's not all that surprising.

    • Unlike Twitter itself, which has been making money hand over fist.

      Twitter can be sold and make its investors money. Perhaps not as much as they dreamed of but still a profit.

      • If Rupert Murdoch has forgotten about MySpace they might flog it off to him.

        Judging by the decisions he makes in his private life, he might be keen.

    • Well the stock is a bargain right now - the market hasn't reacted to this or the layoff news. It's still down even after a better-than-expected earnings report. I'm picking up some shares right now!

    • Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." (Score:5, Informative)

      by T.E.D. ( 34228 ) on Thursday October 27, 2016 @03:17PM (#53163647)

      Unlike Twitter itself, which has been making money ...

      One of the first steps in protecting yourself from finance weasels is to learn what their words mean. In particular, "revenue" and "profit" are two very different things. For example, Twitter's numbers from last quarter [businessinsider.com] show their revenue from the quarter was over $600 million. Perhaps not Google numbers, but not a lot of companies earn that much in a single quarter. However, their profit was about -$100 million. So of course the sensible thing here would be to get rid of some of the things that are costing more than they are making. If Vine has lots of folks working on it, and isn't in fact pulling in a lot of revenue (raw $), then yes it makes perfect sense for a bean-counter to want to get rid of it.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by myNameIsNotImportant ( 592769 )

        the difference between revenue and profit has absolutely nothing to do with being a "finance weasel". it is financial jargon, and a basic one at that.

        do you really mean to imply that failing to understand the distinction between a monitor and a CPU is protecting yourself from IT weasel-words?

      • The only way I see of turning $600M revenue into a $100M loss is to spend $700M...what the actual f*** is there that costs that amount of money?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

          The only way I see of turning $600M revenue into a $100M loss is to spend $700M...what the actual f*** is there that costs that amount of money?

          For reference, they have 3,860 employees, according to their website. Generously assuming average costs of $200,000 yearly each (salary, benefits, health care, etc), that would chew up a bit under $200M in labor costs for the quarter. So there's still half a billion in non-labor expenses there.

    • Well, that was $30 Million well spent.

  • On my machine, "couldn't" is rendering as "couldna-hat(TM)t" where "a-hat" is the a with the little hat mark over it. It's probably a unicide bug, but it's as if you're saying that "couldn't find a buyer" is a trademarked phrase, which it kind of is.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Allicorn ( 175921 )

      "Unicide" : when a website kills its own usability by failing to specify its character set correctly.

      • More like Windows is fucking retarded and that's what the stupid "smart apostrophe" looks like when going from Windows-1252 to whatever useless encoding Slashdot uses.

        Smart quotes are a scourge, only typography weenies give a shit. ASCII ' and " should be enough for everybody.

        • ...whatever useless encoding Slashdot uses...

          Hmmmmmm.....

          <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

        • I don't know what the path is that leads to the error, but FWIW this was Firefox on Windows. Whenever I see screwed up stuff like that, I usually assume they are on a Mac; but I have no idea if that's the most common cause or not.

          In any event, we got their attention and it's fixed!

  • Where are we going to get our "Best of Vine" Youtube Compilations now?!

    Oh, wait--

  • It seemed to me that Vine was just a bunch of people screwing around trying to be funny and failing.

    • Kind of like SNL in the late-2000s...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by psyclone ( 187154 )

      And nothing of value was lost.

    • I've found funny people on vine. It took some digging though, which might be part of why it failed to take off. As far as only trying for comedy, yeah, five seconds isn't enough time to do much more than a simple gag.

      Sometimes constraints on stuff people make up ends up working better. Scientific research presentations that are 15 minutes to half an hour are usually the good talks. Presentations where the researcher is allowed to blabber on and on about their snail penis research which they think is the

  • I prefer Twitter... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Thursday October 27, 2016 @02:27PM (#53163349)

    Of the various antisocial networks, I prefer Twitter to things like Facebook.

    Twitter let's you be anonymous. Twitter doesn't track you quite as closely. (I'm sure they still do, but I don't see Twitter getting blocked on my browser for tracking). Twitter doesn't introduce new privacy effacing features and turn them on by default. Twitter doesn't let other people upload your picture and tag it if you're not a member.

    Twitter actually serves a purpose other than spreading your vanity. It's a great source to find out "happening now" news and information (understanding much of it is flawed). Twitter connects the world instead of small networks.

    Twitter is fairly benign. I'd much rather it survive and facebook die. Shame it is so unprofitable.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tattood ( 855883 )

      Twitter actually serves a purpose other than spreading your vanity. It's a great source to find out "happening now" news and information (understanding much of it is flawed)

      I beg to differ. Twitter is superb at showing people's vanity. Why do you think that almost every celebrity has a Twitter account? Do people really need to know what Justin Bieber and Beyonce are up to at any moment? No, but millions of people care about what celebrities are doing, and the celebrities love knowing that millions of people care about what they are doing. Twitter is ego stroking at its finest.

  • I guess you could say... (Score:3)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Thursday October 27, 2016 @02:33PM (#53163381)

    ...it's dying on the Vine.

    YEEEAAAH!!!

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