Ex-Vine staffers warn that the app's whole code will need to be rewritten and joke that Elon Musk should relaunch it with 69-second videos
- Ex-technical lead at Vine warns that the app's whole code will need to be rewritten if Elon Musk wants to revive it.
- Some of the code for Vine is a decade old, Sara Beykpour — who led the app's shuttering — said.
Vine's creators and former staffers have weighed in on Elon Musk's plans to revive the short-form video app and compete with TikTok.
In response to an Axios report that Twitter engineers have been told to look through Vine's code, with the ambition of bringing the app back before the end of the year, one former staffer offered her advice. Sara Beykpour, whose LinkedIn shows she worked at Twitter from 2009 to 2021, noted that she "led the shutdown of Vine."
Beykpour explained to her 66,000 followers how Vine's outdated code could delay plans to rejuvenate the app. With all of it being at least six years old, and some parts older than ten, Beykpour said: "You don't want to look there."
"If you want to revive Vine, you should start over," she added.
Vine's creators also tweeted about Musk's apparent decision to resurrect their invention, weighing in with joke suggestions.
Rus Yusupov replied to the new Twitter owner's question of how best to compete with TikTok, the Chinese-owned short-form video app, by suggesting "69 second videos."
Yusupov has previously expressed regrets about selling Vine to Twitter, but appeared to see the lighter side of things by joking about Musk's teenager-like sense of humor.
Another co-founder of Vine, Dom Hofmann, also referred to reports of the app's revival by comparing it to the classic RPG RuneScape.
Alongside a screenshot of the game RuneScape, Hofmann said: "If ur gonna revive beloved software look no further than the gold standard."
Hofmann didn't elaborate on his tweet, but it appeared to be a reference to the 2013 launch of an old school version of the game after purists complained about changes to the modern version of the game.