Microsoft Vine Adds Real Time News and Location Data to Your Address Book
Microsoft has announced details about its latest Live.com web service, a location-aware, real time notification service for your address book called Vine.
Vine is primarily a tool for keeping those in your close social network — family and friends — updated with your status in times of emergency or distress. It can also be used to find and distribute information about weather events, school closures or community gatherings.
The service, which looks like a desktop widget, pulls in status updates from the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the people in your Live.com address book you want to keep tabs on. It also culls weather feeds from the NOAA and news feeds from local alert services. There are clients for desktops and Windows Mobile smartphones to post status messages and keep loved ones informed about where you are, how you’re doing and how to get in touch with you.
It’s in private beta right now, so we haven’t tested it, and Microsoft has not yet responded to repeated requests for more information. However, there are a handful of video demos and an FAQ fact sheet available on Vine.net which give you a good picture of what it’s about.
With the proliferation of always-connected mobile devices, your location is becoming increasingly important to anyone who wants to get ahold of you. This has led to a rise in geo-aware applications for smartphones and laptops that are able to provide real-time updates of your whereabouts to those within your immediate social network.
Geo-aware apps like FourSquare and Shizzow are useful for ad hoc meetups (usually at bars or restaurants), but location services like Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Google Latitude, when tied to an address book or contact manager, can provide a valuable level of context if somebody needs to get in touch with you immediately. For example, if I know you’re visiting New Zealand or on a plane to London right now, that alters my expectation that you’ll return my call before the clock strikes noon in San Francisco.
We’ve been watching the socialization of presence, colloquially known as “Address Book 2.0,” develop slowly for the last few years. But it’s ready to erupt now that the sensors in our pockets (cameras, GPS) have improved and developers have begun writing web applications to harness these new data channels. We’re already seeing huge leaps forward in location-aware search apps (Yelp), and news gathering apps (Twitter). Geo-enabling our address books and opening them up with emerging standards like Portable Contacts are the next logical steps.
Vine is an extension of that trend. Judging from the way Microsoft is positioning the product in its pre-launch marketing, it looks like the company is targeting Vine for use by families and neighbors to meet the demands of crisis management. The videos on Vine.net show it being used during floods, health emergencies and, for some strange reason, as a way to locate the person in your family who bakes the tastiest slice of pie.
It’s an interesting angle — fear and paranoia may not seem like the best selling points, but events like floods and health emergencies are certainly the “to hell with privacy” moments that make sense to those who need to be convinced of the usefulness of geo-aware apps.
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