Twitter just announced they’re shutting down Vine. The situation is bound to change in the upcoming days, but I wanted to share my immediate thoughts on the topic.
Services close all the time. Beloved services close all the time (RIP Google Reader). Now Twitter announced they are closing Vine. And people are scrambling to figure out what to do. So what to do ?
- Celebrate: Vine brought so much good stuff. There will be roundups. The duck army will live on.
- Tell Twitter (the company) how you feel about it: it won’t save vine, but it might buy it more time. More time means more opportunity for saving it. Wonder how botched this announcement reflects on Twitter. How it’s felt by the vine founder.
- Backup: if you have a few vines, Mic has a manual procedure to download your videos. Automated ones will likely pop-up. We may build one over at Kumbu, once we figure out what people want to save, and how to grab more than just videos. Or wait until Twitter deliver on their promise of a downloadable tool.
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Convenience and reach will always be more attractive than data ownership
I’ll have more to say in the next days, but before I go, I wanted to add one more thing: don’t blame people for having used vine. There’s a common reaction to blame victims of data loss for not doing backups, or for using proprietary services. We need to walk away from this. Convenience and reach will always be more attractive than data ownership. It’s up to the industry to step up their game, and empower people with their data. It’s never the user’s fault. It’s not on Vine, and it won’t be on Tumblr or Livejournal when those will close too. It’s up to us, at Kumbu, and otherplaces to think, discuss, pressure and provide the tools to empower people with their own creations.
What next?
Interested in helping? Have thoughts on how to approach yet another service shutting down? Reach out and talk to us.
We’ve already started to work on an alternative for our users’ Vines. If you too are interested in saving your Vines, you should take our 1 minute survey.
I’m Ziad Wakim CEO and Founder of Kumbu — the Souvenir Box for the Digital Era. Please share this article if you like it, thanks!
