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Twitter partly un-kills Vine, which will live again as Vine Camera

Re-branded app will offer the chance to migrate Vine friends to Twitter

Twitter's decided not to completely kill its video-looping service Vine.

Back in October things looked grim for Vine after Twitter announced it was discontinuing the mobile app.

Now the company has explained that Vine, the service, will die but that Vine, the app, will continue.

That means Vine will cease to function as a discrete social network and it will no longer be possible to post Vines to Vine. All existing Vines will still be there to see at Vine.com and downloads of one's entire Vine oeuvre remain possible, for the foreseeable future. Or perhaps until Twitter's financials get even more precarious.

Come January, Twitter will re-brand the Vine app as “Vine Camera”. The everything-old-is-new-again app will let you record six-second videos and let you post them to Twitter and Twitter alone. But the vids will also appear in mobile devices' camera rolls and what you do with them from there is your own business.

Twitter's also promised “ a way to make it easy for your Vine followers to follow you on Twitter” and, in an FAQ, explains some tweakage of Vine user settings to merge Vine and Twitter accounts will make the migration possible.

Vine became a de-facto standard for short looping videos, a form that while widely popular offered little obvious route to profit. By linking Vine to Twitter, the avian network has a chance to bring in more eyeballs and perhaps some more advertising dollars. Which it needs, rather urgently, because it keeps losing money. ®

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