Vine founder says he will create 'follow-up' to hugely popular app, leading to hopes it will be revived

Twitter bought and then all but shut down the once huge app

(Getty Images)

Vine, the once hugely popular short video app, might be about to launch a comeback.

The app was all but shut down at the beginning of this year. It brought disappointment to its many fans, who praised the new forms of video that it had allowed by forcing people into expressing themselves in just six seconds.

Now its founder, Dom Hofmann, says that he is working on a "follow-up" to the app. It will presumably include many of the same features – including the important limit on how much can be filmed.

"I'm going to work on a follow-up to Vine," he wrote on Twitter. "I've been feeling it myself for some time and have seen a lot of tweets, DMs, etc."

Mr Hofmann then posted tweets suggesting that it would be separate to his current work – and therefore presumably a true successor to the now defunct app. He finished by tweeting "nothing else to share yet, but more as it develops".

Vine was founded in June 2012, and bought by Twitter not long after. For the following few years, it flourished – with the short videos creating new kinds of comedy and other videos, as well as making celebrities out of some of its most famous users.

But last year, Twitter announced that the app would be shut down. Nobody would be allowed to upload new Vines, it said – though old Vines are still stored in an archive set up by Twitter, and don't appear to be getting deleted any time soon.

While Twitter also released an app called Vine Camera – which allowed for the creation of short videos – the entire genre and community that had formed through the app appeared to completely collapse. Many famous Vines are still occasionally shared on Twitter, but the app itself is no longer accessible and it has lost much of its place in the culture.