One of the main criticisms thrown at the internet is that it is constantly distracting us. We’re now distant introverts constantly trying our hardest to not check our phones for notifications, no matter the social situation we are in. One of the main culprits in the destruction of our attention span is Vine. Its six-second looping video format meant we could be genuinely entertained in less time than it takes most of us to finish a sentence. Vine didn’t last. But you can’t keep a phenomenon down.
Don Hoffman, co-founder of Vine, announced byte, a follow up to Vine that will launch in spring 2019
Vine was originally founded by Dom Hoffman, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll back in June 2012. Twitter bought Vine before its official launch but competition from the likes of Instagram, Snapchat, and other more traditional video platforms like YouTube led Twitter to stop new videos from being uploaded in 2016. Yusuprov and Kroll went on to found the now-famous interactive game show app HQ Trivia, but Hoffman stated that he was working on a Vine V2 app that wouldn’t be affiliated with Twitter.
our new looping video app is called byte. launching spring 2019 pic.twitter.com/C3FMvkcIwc
— dom hofmann (@dhof) November 8, 2018
It looked as though Hoffman’s project wasn’t going to see the light of day though, when he posted on the V2 community forums that the project was being indefinitely postponed, citing “financial and legal hurdles.” This all changed just a couple of days ago, when Hoffman tweeted that he would be launching a new looping video app called byte in Spring 2019. We’ll have to wait to find out more details about byte, but if it will be based on Hoffman’s published plans for V2, it should be a place for publishing videos between two to six-and-a-half seconds.
The short length of Vine videos forced users to be creative in ways never seen before. Vine might have helped shave minutes off of our attention spans, but it did it bring something fresh to the internet. When Twitter choked off new uploads, it left a hole that needed filling. Hopefully, when byte launches next Spring, we’ll start to see a whole raft of new creators rising to internet stardom.
To find out more about byte you can head over to www.byte.co and sign up for updates. If you’d like updates about all your favorite apps and programs, sign up to our newsletter by entering your email address in the form below.
Some of our favorite Vine creators
ProZD
Thomas Sanders
David Lopez
