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Vine’s six-second looping videos aren’t going away after all

Vine will live on as a camera app.

D Dipasupil / Getty

Twitter announced back in October that it was killing Vine, its standalone video app, “in the coming months.”

That process is now under way, according to a blog post, but it turns out Vine isn’t going to disappear for good: The app will actually live on, but only for creating six-second videos that users can then share to other networks (like Twitter).

In other words, Vine is transforming from a social network with features like comments and profiles and followers, to a creative tool where you can make a six-second video to share other places.

This is interesting because when Twitter announced Vine was shutting down, it didn’t mention the possibility that the app — or the six-second looping video format it popularized — would continue to live on. But it will.

This also seems like a pretty clear sign that Twitter is not going to sell Vine. After it was announced that Vine was shutting down, Twitter received some interest from numerous potential buyers, according to multiple sources. That process must now be over.

As part of the wind-down process, Vine will add a “Follow on Twitter” button in the next week or so that Vine users can use to transport some of their following to their accounts. The app’s celebrity users have already been working on that, though.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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