Microsoft Vine: It’s a jungle out there

Microsoft’s latest service integrates Twitter-esque status updates with mapping and news streams to help keep up with family and friends in a time of emergency. Luckily you don’t actually have to be caught in the middle of an emergency to use it.

Vine was created after the devastation of hurricane Katrina left families unable to find and communicate with one another. Tammy Savage of Microsoft saw the need and worked for the last few years to refine the concept.

By combining news and updates from friends and geo-location data, users can keep up with what’s going on with friends and in their community. The service integrates updates from over 20,000 sources such as NOAA and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Users can post quick alerts akin to Twitter or Facebook status messages or longer articles that they can send to their friends. Vine accepts messages from the desktop application as well as SMS in case users cannot access the Internet.

Right now Microsoft is working with emergency management professionals to beta test Vine. The first large scale test will have 10,000 users in the Seatlle, WA along with a number of emergency management agencies.

Next Microsoft plans to test Vine in a rural mid-western community and an isolated island in an undisclosed location. This is ostensibly to see how these different communities would use the service and how they might react differently to the kind of emergencies that they see more regularly.

However, all the talk of natural disasters and making sure that you don’t lose track of family and friends is slightly unnerving. Other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook could be used for a similar purpose without the need to sell the fear of a major catastrophe.

In fact, Vine appears to be a fairly well done location-based social network and could likely be adopted by users without any fear, uncertainty or doubt. Screenshot below:

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