As of this week Twitter announced that it'll be ending the six second video platform Vine.
While it is sad to see the closure of any platform, I have to admit I think the impact and creativity of the platform has passed. When it first launched it created a wave of excitement and a race for brands to be the first to showcase themselves on this new shiny format.
Overtime though the brands and creators evolved, they found that the content style could work on a very old format that somehow came back into trend. The GIF.
The GIF gave all the advantages of the limited format but with none of the limits of been locked into an app or platform. The ability to be seen around the web natively meant that the humble GIF took a lot of the shine from the looping format.
Ultimately the end for Vine came from stagnation. Not from the user base but from itself. It didn't look at what the world was sharing, instead it wanted the world to share its vision.
On another note I always found Vines very hard to share and embed - which meant that in the end vine creations either ended up in an echo chamber or just got re-uploaded to YouTube, thus creating a new set of creators for their platform.
The big question remains will Snapchat and Instagram evolve enough to keep pace with changing tastes? Early signs look good, but as Facebook has shown at some point you stop chasing the 'cool' crowd and cement yourself as a function of digital life, not a highlight.