VineSo everyone freaked out a bit when Twitter announced earlier this year that it would shut down Vine, its network for sharing six-second (and eventually longer) videos with your friends. Much of the upset focused on how Vine had appealed strongly to groups who frequently felt out of place or even harassed on bigger social networks like Twitter and Facebook. So Vine was somewhat of a safe space for them to be creative, even as much of the attention from brands and “influencers” waned over the years.

Now Twitter has announced Vine isn’t completely going away, though it’s changing significantly. Instead of shutting down, Vine will live on as a video creation app, a stand-alone camera for mobile devices that will still let you take and create six-second videos. Instead of completing the circuit with a network dedicated to those creations, though, people will be able to send them to Twitter or simply save them to their phones for use later and possibly elsewhere.

That means it could be a way for the creators who once congregated around Vine to keep doing what they’ve been doing, just on Twitter (not likely) or Snapchat (much more likely). Whatever the case, it will be interesting to see how the community that once rallied around Vine reacts to this news. Even more than that, my guess is it won’t be long until we see Facebook, Snapchat and other tools copy this feature to bring them in even closer, though it’s a bit surprising they haven’t already done so. Instagram already has Boomerang, which creates short looping GIF-like videos that integrates well with Facebook, of course. So we’ll see if this becomes part of someone else’s product roadmap.