You mean like vine? Twitter bought it and killed it. The founder moved on to launch Byte https://www.byte.co/
>
Vine was 6 second long video clips. Comparing Vine to TikTok is somewhat like comparing TikTok to YouTube videos. They are different.
Lot of TikTok popularity has come from offering songs/lip syncing functionality (done better by their acquisition of musica.ly). That wouldn't have worked on 6 second Vines.
TikTok allows 15 second videos (only 2.5x the length of Vine videos) but also has a way to string multiple videos together for 60 seconds of play time (10x longer than Vine had).
So this is actually a pretty fair comparison (old Twitter @ 140 vs new Twitter @ 280) if you ignore stringing them together.
As an aside, it's insane to me that the differentiating feature of an entirely new video hosting platform can simply be the length of the content it supports.
The world of tech companies is truly bizarre. Why doesn't Google launch dozens of Youtube variants under their own branding with their own slightly different length restrictions to just dominate the market?
The music integration was the biggest example of this, and probably why the lip-syncing/dancing videos became so popular on the platform.
Which is different from ByteDance, which is the company that owns TikTok, for those confused like me.