It's been a little over a year since Twitter went and bought video hosting start-up Vine, but there seems to have been remarkably little shakeup at the company in that time. Maybe that is because the team at Vine was so small when it was purchase, consisting of only three people.
As it eventually happens, though, creative people do eventually need to move on to new and different projects, and now it looks like Vine is losing one of its oldest and most key players.
Dom Hofmann, one of the co-founders, and the former CEO, of the social video-sharing service, has stepped down from his role as lead general manager role, according to a report from ReCode on Tuesday.
That is not to say that Hofmann is leaving the company entirely; it sounds as though he will be staying on in some capacity, though in a more limited role, and one that does not require him to work there on a daily basis.
Perhaps Hofmann's departure was expected, as sources told ReCode that his position has already been filled. Jason Toff, who is a product manager at YouTube, has already accepted the position as the new product manager position at Vine.
As you should have already expected, the reason that Hofmann seems to be leaving is not because of any problems at the company, but becayse he has his own project he wants to start working on, though no details of what that might be have been revealed so far.
VatorNews has reached out to Twitter to confirm these reports. We will update the story if and when we learn more.
Twitter bought Vine back in October of 2012, before debuting the service in January of 2013. Vine, as everyone know now, allows users to create and share six second long looping videos that can be embedded into tweets, or uploaded onto a separate Vine web page.
The purchase was a smart one for both Vine and Twitter, as the app surged in popularity, rising to become the top free app on iOS in April, and then getting up to 13 million users by June, right at the time it debuted on Android.
By August, Vine had more than tripled its userbase to 40 million, which was enough for it to be able to fend off a direct threat from Instagram, which debuted its own video feature in June, allowing users to make videos that are between 3 and 15 seconds long.
(Image source: https://vine.co)
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
