Vine app will be pared down and relaunched as Vine Camera in January

In October, Twitter stated it was going to shut down its Vine six-second video app and service as part of an overall restructuring of the social networking company. The response from the many popular Vine content creators and fans was one of shock, and now Twitter is backtracking a bit from that move, stating that the Vine app will be pared down and relaunched as the new Vine Camera app in January.

In an announcement on Medium, Twitter stated that the new Vine Camera app will still be able to take 6.5 second videos, and those clips can be uploaded to a Twitter account, or stored in a phone’s camera roll. However, users won’t be able to upload new videos to the Vine site; that will still be turned into an archive of older Vine clips.

The good news for Vine creators is that Twitter will now allow them to download any of their older videos from the site or through the new Vine Camera app. Finally, Twitter will soon set up a way for people to link their Vine and Twitter accounts so that fans can quickly find Vine creators on Twitter.

Previous rumors claimed that several companies were planning to acquire Vine from Twitter, but so far, those reports have yet to come to fruition.