As Twitter continues its attempts to get its business back on track, the company announced on Thursday that it’s shutting down Vine, a short-form video service it acquired in late 2012.
Vine co-founder Rus Yusupov was surprised by the news, he told tech news site TechCrunch, but he and Colin Kroll, another of Vine’s cofounders, are already on to their next social app, which they debuted later on product forum Product Hunt on Thursday. The app, called HYPE, is a live video broadcasting app that lets users add music and animations to their videos. For now, the app seems to be in beta phase, meaning that it’s available only to a limited number of users as the founders continue to test it.
Get Data Sheet, Coins2Day’s technology newsletter.
On Thursday afternoon, Yusupov and Kroll held a live session on HYPE during which they discussed the early days of Vine, their new app, and took questions from viewers, who posted comments during the video broadcast.
HYPE will likely compete with other live video apps, including Periscope, which Twitter (TWTR) owns and Facebook’s (FB) Live video service—a tough race, as early live video app Meerkat can attest. Despite coming out first and getting a lot of early attention, Meerkat was quickly eclipsed by Periscope and Facebook Live. Its parent company recently shut it down for good.
For more on Twitter, watch this Coins2Day video:
Yusupov and Kroll, along with third co-founder Dom Hofmann built Vine in 2012 and sold it to Twitter for $30 million that fall. Though Twitter expressed great enthusiasm for its new service at the beginning, it seemed to spend fewer and fewer resources on maintaining and improving it over the years—especially as it shifted its attention to Periscope, which it acquired last year. Yusupov was laid off from Twitter last year, according to TechCrunch.
Hofmann left Vine in 2013 and went on to develop his own set of mobile apps, including Byte and Peach, the latter of which saw a short-lived period of buzz a the beginning of 2016.
