Twitter’s decision to shut down Vine is one of the many big shut downs we’ve seen in the past year or so.  Grantland, JABO, and Sky Mall, oh wait, no one cares about Sky Mall, have left us lately.  Vine is probably the most popular and important to leave us, however.

This is a sports blog, but I want to touch on what this means for everyone, not just Sports-Twtter people.  Vine made Twitter.  It made memes.  Seriously.  Countless memes that will go down as GOATs were created by Vine or took off because of it.

I think what Twitter didn’t realize was that Twitter helped Vine more than Vine helped itself.  No one really went on Vine’s app anymore.  “Going on Vine” died, but Vines didn’t.  The app was really only there for the people who provide us the comedy or news/highlights we got via it.

You have to think that Twitter had analytics that told them how many loops came from Twitter compared to how many came from the app itself,  because we all know Twitter’s numbers would be higher.  Plus, the amount of times someone watches a Vine on YouTube isn’t counted towards loops.  Twitter also seemed to fail at taking that into account.

Thats why this is so frustrating.  Vine was and is still a huge part of our lives.  We just don’t seem to take it into account anymore.  Twitter unfortunately didn’t either.

Vine was huge for sports and sports Twitter.  Vine was one of the reasons ESPN had to go through such massive talent cuts.  Those came about due to the massive amount of money ESPN poured into their new SportsCenter set, which is a show thats practically been ruined by Vine.

With social media, Vine and Twitter especially, we can see what happened right away.  Pre-Internet, people had to tune into SportsCenter late at night to see what happened that day in sports.  The world just wasn’t current, or live enough then.

But Vine revolutionized that.  A highlight segment on SportsCenter is a bunch of short video clips edited into a package.  The individuals video clips are plays, which for most sports, don’t take longer than six seconds.

Thats why Vine was perfect for instant highlights.  We could immediately see what happened on Vine or Twitter without watching a three minute long news package three hours after the play happened.

That took away the whole idea of SportsCenter, but its not necessarily Vine’s fault for killing the show, its ESPN’s, who failed to realize what Vine meant to us before building a brand new $125 million set.

Vine was perfectly engineered for the Internet.  It gave us anything we wanted, whether we are sports fans, artists, TV reporters, or people who have nothing to do and just scroll through Vine after Vine.  It was everything the Internet needed, and the Internet just won’t be the same without it.