Twitter is having a really bad year as it struggles with growth and looks for a new suitor as SalesForce determined they were no longer interested in acquiring the company. Twitter announced earlier today that it would be slashing 9% of its global workforce and then followed that up with an announcement that the company’s once popular Vine video service will also be no more.
Vine deemed surplus to requirements
For a company that redefined how we communicate, it’s hard to believe that Twitter is struggling as monumentally as it indeed is these days. Twitter announced that the mobile app would be shut down “in coming months” and with no mobile app, that means that you can’t shoot Vine videos. Essentially, this move kills the app, and it’s being rumored that a number of Vine employees were shown the figurative door earlier today in the announced job cuts that will clear out nearly a tenth of the company.
Twitter made it clear that, at least for now, the company would not be deleted existing Vines that have already been posted and thanks to its users for making it a once popular way of communication.
“You’ll be able to access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to be still able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made,” Twitter wrote in a Medium post.
The six-second video clip company Vine was purchased by Twitter in 2012 before launching on its own. Twitter then spent a few months integrating Vine into its micro-blogging platform before releasing the service to its user base which immediately took to it if only for a few years six seconds at a time.
While Vine enjoyed limited early success, the service slowly withered on the, well, Vine and the co-founders of the company which went to work for Twitter ending up quitting within a couple of years. Much of Vine’s demise could certainly be blamed on the growing popularity of Instagram especially when it began offering the ability to record videos not limited to six seconds.
Twitter will surely survive but to find a buyer the company is going to need to lower its asking price.
