Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
It&#x27;s such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can. I admire that.<p>Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies&#x27; valuation, but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single social network is trending towards feature parity with each other -- Facebook now has streaming video, Snapchat now has a decent text chat with messages that need not disappear, Instagram has an algorithmic no-longer-timeline wall and private messaging, they all have ads, even Tumblr now has IM and livestreaming. Some (important) differences remain, but from an observer time-travelling forward from 2012, the social networks of today would appear nearly interchangeable.<p>But there&#x27;s Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging. Instead, it developed (or acquired) other formats and cultivated them as separate services, separate communities. It&#x27;s unfortunate that not even wide societal impact can make a service profitable, or at least quell the pressure to feature-creep outside of your original scope.