Microsoft’s Vine

Recently Microsoft launched Microsoft Vine, primarily now in its beta form, which is designed to allow small groups and organizations to share vital information. Vine is a downloadable application that allows us to send out Twitter-style alerts, circulate reports with more complete information, and keep track of user Vine contacts. This sounds a lot like a social network, but according to Microsoft, Vine is built solely as a way to organise and disseminate important information among organisations such as sports teams, schools and colleges, or to stay in touch with neighbours, family, and friends during an emergency. Right now, Vine is only available for machines running Windows XP with SP2 or Windows Vista 32- and 64-bit editions.

Vine starts at the dashboard, which pops up as a widget-like window on user desktop. Users can sign in into Vine using user Windows Live ID (Microsoft has not said whether user Messenger contacts would be automatically pulled in to user Vine network). Vine lets us control the information we want to send out by organising user contacts into groups; it also lets us decide who can send information to us.

 Users can also send and receive Vine alerts via text message or e-mail. Microsoft says it has plans in the future to incorporate more ways to interact with Vine, including Twitter, landline telephones, and special needs devices. The idea is to make Vine as inclusive a service as possible and allow people to interact with Vine in a way that feels natural to them. As said earlier, Vine is in private beta right now and only open to 10,000 people based in the Seattle area. Microsoft came out with Vine, which the company calls a "societal networking" service. Vine is currently a free service and Microsoft has yet to release any monetisation plans for Vine.

 If anybody asks if this is another social media application, then Microsoft has a good answer to reply them back. Microsoft says Vine is a hyper local, personalized message and alert system. It is especially good during emergency periods. And, it's intended to be a dashboard that people can use to keep tabs of their family, friends, activities and major events in their community. The dashboard -- which appears as a widget on a PC screen -- displays a map of the user's community and the status of their contacts. It also has buttons to send alerts or reports, which can be sent and received on the PC or as text messages on a cell phone.

 Till now this service is available in US only but let’s wait until it is rolled out in the rest of the world including Nepal. Moreover, it would be interesting to watch if Vine can catch up to Microsoft’s expectations as the similar contenders are already at high pace while this product is now just in its early beta stage.