Vine 2: Could six-second videos be back from the dead?

Vine was dead, to begin with. I’m paraphrasing A Christmas Carol partly because it seems a festive thing to do in early December, but also because the six-second video app has only actually been dead for 11 months. It’s figuratively not even cold, but there are already plans to bring it back in some form if a tweet from co-founder Dom Hofmann is to be believed.

I would call it a cryptic tweet, but it’s really only cryptic in the same way that a nursery rhyme is. The mint green backdrop. The white text. The curly font. This is Vine, alright.

And even if you did consider this some kind of case of mistaken identity, Hofmann actually tweeted his intention to revive Vine at the end of November:

Still, successful development is far from a certainty. For starters, Hofmann has a full time job, and concedes that this will be a self-funded project done on the side next to his current work at his new company, Interspace.

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Perhaps even more importantly, Vine isn’t his anymore. Hofmann left the company, according to his website, in 2014. Twitter bought Vine before launch in 2012, so you’d imagine its current board of directors would have something to say about its former employee kicking off a follow-up app on something they still own the rights to. Unless some kind of agreement has been reached – or the app is drastically different to the original – any kind of rebirth is far from guaranteed.

It’s possible of course that we’re only hearing about this now because a non-compete clause has expired, either via the slow march of time, or because Twitter itself provided a loophole by shutting down Vine – though if that is the case, the issue is muddied by the existence of the Vine Camera.

We’ve reached out to Twitter to seek clarity on these points, and will update the piece when we hear back. We’ll be watching this video on loop until they do, so the sooner the better please guys.