Microsoft Vine: The Zune of Social Networks
by John Paczkowski
Posted on April 28, 2009 at 9:09 AM PT
Think of it as Facebook for the people you actually know and like, those whose health and safety you’d worry about in a natural disaster. It’s called Microsoft Vine and it’s not so much a social network as it is a “societal” one–or at least, Redmond likes to bill it as such.
Announced today and scheduled for beta in May, Vine is a hyperlocal messaging and alert system intended to be used to share information during a crisis. Properly configured, it will gather local news and public safety announcements along with location information, reports and messages from friends–eventually even those posted to other services, like Facebook and Twitter–into a handy little dashboard. This being Microsoft (MSFT), that dashboard will be proprietary and require PCs running XP SP2 or Vista and 600 MB of hard disk space.
So really, Vine is not so much a societal network for people you care about, but for the PC users you care about. A proprietary disaster messaging system… sigh, only from Microsoft.
Anyway…. It’s an interesting idea–not so much as the “societal network” Microsoft touts it as but as a cunning end run around established services. Twitter and Facebook are fun, recreational, but Vine has gravitas. It’s the network you turn to when things fall apart–assuming you meet the proper system requirements–because it consolidates the Tweets and status updates you actually want to read with need-to-know public safety announcements. Of course, Microsoft won’t admit that. “We intend this to be a service of services–to not replace social networking tools that exist today, but embrace them,” Tammy Savage, Microsoft Vine general manager, told TechFlash.
Yeah, embrace and extend and… well, we all know what comes next.
Comments
I think its really interesting how from enterprises/gov’t agencies to individual consumers, its clear that visualization (Geo-tagging) is going to be a part of our lives. What Vine is doing is very cool for when a disaster hits – but until then people want to see their friends (all their friends/even Mac users) in their network – IRL Connect (www.irlconnect.com) is a visual/presence-based network that allows you to integrate with social networks (facebook/twitter/mobile social networks) so you can see your friends on the map (with Wi-Fi positioning on Google maps or Google Street View) but you can also have conversation and see and post content (geo-tagged on the map). There are similarities between IRL Connect and Vine (like Greg Sterling points out in his post today http://gesterling.wordpress.co.....ate-beta/) but IRL Connect let’s all geotagged content, conversations and social networks flow in and out of the platform, allowing the user to see the virtual world around him/her. Try it at http://www.irlconnect.com
Posted by Alex Crabb at April 28th, 2009 at 10:06 amFunny, as most disasters I am facing are normally related to MS products…
Posted by Uwe Rueckeshaeuser at April 28th, 2009 at 11:30 amYeah, it’s going to be a disaster alright.
Posted by Mac Beach at April 28th, 2009 at 1:44 pmI think I’m missing something. In a real “local” disaster: a) isn’t there a good chance you’ll lose the internet service on which depends and b) possibly (preferably) not be hanging out with a machine capable of running this massive, hard-drive eating “dashboard”?
Posted by Alex Freudenheim at April 28th, 2009 at 7:41 pm