Vine is dead. Long live Vine.

Another social media phenom, Twitter’s video app Vine, has joined the ash heap of history. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Or sad. The digital landscape is littered with the cutesy logos of next-big-things gone by. So as a strategist at Genuine, I’m encouraging my team to spend little time mourning the passing of Vine, and focusing instead on what it taught us.

There are three key things Vine brought to digital storytelling we should be thankful for:

• Short-form storytelling. Before Vine, if you had tried to sell-in the idea of telling a compelling story in six seconds, you wouldn’t have gotten very far with most brand teams. But brands like Lowe’s and GE, through innovations like #LowesFixInSix and #6SecondScience created compelling, actionable info in less time than it takes to remember your network password.

Above: GE used Vine to tell six-second stories about science.

• Visual storytelling. While you could include audio with your Vine videos, they were presented on mute by default. What’s commonplace best practice today – assume your audiences are watching your videos on mobile and mute – was pretty revolutionary.
• User-generated video storytelling. As difficult as it is to imagine today, creating videos to share was pretty much left to the professionals a very short while ago. With Vine, people began to use their smartphone cameras for more than just stills or video scenario sharing – they started seeing the video capability on their phone as an option for capturing and assembling the building blocks of a compelling story.

The lessons of Vine’s rapid decline are not lost on other social video platforms. Vine failed to make itself brand-friendly quickly enough, and other me-too features of more established platforms pushed it to the brink of oblivion, and eventually over the edge.

For us, we’ll choose to be forever thankful to Vine for showing us new ways to tell a compelling story.