Vine as we know it is closing up shop today, so this is the last chance to download your Vines before they're gone for good.
Twitter's Vine announced back in October 2016 that it was shutting down the six-second video hosting platform and the day has now come, putting Vine to sleep for good. On Jan. 17, 2017, Vine is officially morphing into a simple camera app that just enables users to record six-second looping videos.
During the three years that it was available, Vine hosted some legendary videos that often became viral. The looping videos made people laugh and challenged them to capture the essence of a scene in just a few seconds - six, to be precise.
Twitter bought Vine in hopes that it would perfectly complement its microblogging site and it actually did so for a while. However, Vine started losing steam eventually and the lack of innovation and attractive new features led to a notable decline.
Twitter never really explained why it decided to shut Vine down rather than innovate and improve the experience, but Vine nonetheless met its demise and the last train to save your videos is about to leave the station in just a few short hours.
"The Vine app will become the Vine Camera on Jan. 17. Please download your Vines before then," Vine warns in an update to a previous post regarding the change.
How To Save Your Vines
You have three options when it comes to downloading your vines: via the app, via the desktop site, or via email. The app and website allow you to select Vines individually, but will not include the comments, likes, and shares. The email option, however, will download Vines complete with "extras" so you have the whole social experience saved.
To download your Vines from the app, just open it on your mobile, head over to your profile, and select "Save Videos." You can choose to save the videos to your phone's storage or get a download link sent to your email address.
To download the videos from the desktop site, head over to Vine's website and click the blue button that says "Download Your Vines." It's in the top right corner, right next to the "Login" button.
Vine Camera
The new Vine Camera that's ready to replace the old Vine will enable users to record looping videos six and a half seconds long and either save them on their mobile devices or post them on Twitter. The Vine Camera doesn't offer an option to upload looping videos like Vine did.
Users can also take advantage of the "Follow On Twitter" feature that allows them to connect their Vine and Twitter accounts, but this requires that the account be set to "public."
It remains to be seen whether the Vine Camera app will manage to stay competitive and be at least as successful as Vine was in its glory days, but it looks promising. Vine Camera goes into effect today, just as Vine steps down.
Have you downloaded your Vine videos yet? If not, you might want to hurry.
