‘Micro blogging’ is a term which came in with Twitter more or less, and judging by the reaction out there to Microsoft’s newest venture called Vine, lots of comparisons are already being made to Twitter. It is clear from the comments that people are posting that no one is truly clear on how it will work. Not that is unless you live in the Seattle area and are privy to the very small pilot beta program in progress there.
But more will become clear when they spread the Beta out across the globe. To get involved with that go to www.vine.net and register for an invitation. I did and go an email back about 3 days later saying:
Invitations will be distributed gradually over the next two months until we reach beta capacity. We will start by adding our pilot communities and then expand based on a first-come, first-served basis. Once you receive an invitation in your e-mail in-box and join Microsoft Vine, you will be able to invite the people you care about immediately.
So looks like I’ll have to wait a bit more. So here’s an attempt to give some pointers about what could make this service different:
It’s being plugged as ‘hyperlocal’ which presumably means that its emphasis is on tracking activity in your local area
Microsoft’s wants the service to be used by emergency management officials so presumably this means that different people would be able to easily coordinate their activities within a finite area and in reaction to a single major event (emergency)
the service is debuting with data feeds from more than 20,000 media sources and public safety organizations, including NOAA and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children which presumably means that this service could compete with local media services as a source for local up to date information.
Vine allows you to create a network of people you ‘care about’ (emphasis again on use for times of crisis) but presumably this means that it could be used for individuals to use it as a central hub to keep track of local news, data feeds and updates from services such as Twitter and Facebook
Well until I get my hands on the invitation I don’t really know what to make of this, and my main 2 questions about it are: will it be used by emergency services which is its original inspiration? and will normal people be inspired to use it for all kinds of surprising and novel uses? For it to really take off I think it probably will need to achieve both these things. So in the meantime here’s the screen shot of the desktop client:
Vine desktop client
