Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels
I still cannot believe that Twitter bought Vine, couldn't figure out what to do with it, shut it down, then had to bring it back as a read-only archive because there was so much popular outcry.<p>At the time, the story was that all these other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat were adopting short videos, so Vine could not compete anymore. But obviously it was possible to compete, since an <i>entirely new service</i>--Tik Tok--was able to rise against them.<p>That said, I do think there may be a human-oriented life cycle to these sorts of social apps. Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it). Then the next round of teens seek a new platform--even if the functionality is the same--just so they can have it to themselves.<p>Under this theory, there's <i>nothing</i> Twitter could have done with Vine to make it beat Tik Tok, since a crucial feature of Tik Tok is simply that it's new.<p>The business strategy in the face of this theory would be to continuously start or buy new social platforms with similar feature sets, but each time with a new brand that is totally separate from the (older) parent brand so teens don't get scared off.