Vine is back with a dose of nostalgia and a brand new name! It’s called byte, and it brings back the 6-second looping videos we all grew to love.
After Vine was acquired by Twitter in 2012 and then shut down in 2016, the app’s co-creator Dom Hofmann promised that he’d be back with a followup app – a “Vine 2” if you will. The wait for a second helping of 6-second looping videos is now over, with byte, an app that first hit the radar back in 2018.
We first wrote about byte then, and in 2019 it became available in beta. As of Friday last week, byte is available for download on both iOS and Android.
byte has actually been in development for years with Hofmann promising the return of Vine and its community almost since he left Vine after the acquisition by Twitter. The app was originally named V2, but Hofmann rebranded it in May 2018.
It’s possible that you’d confuse it with Bytedance – the company behind TikTok, which happens to be byte’s most major competitor right now. Funnily enough, the app’s earliest iterations included very similar features to TikTok, but it’s now something old Vine fans will be more accustomed to:
All you have to do is upload a video from your camera roll or use the app’s camera to capture videos that are under the six-second time limit. The app will let users “explore what’s loved by the community,” videos that are handpicked by “human editors, or just served up at random.” It promises “lots of ways to discover surprising new personalities, voices, and moments.”
The team behind byte says that it will soon introduce a pilot partner program to pay creators – as the app “celebrates creativity and community,” compensating its creators is one way to support both.
Finally, Hoffmann and his team are keeping their heads to the ground and will read every comment or review that users leave, in order to help make byte better.
Despite not making the 2019 deadline, byte is here now. So we’ll just have to see how far it gets in the current climate.
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