Microsoft Vine Review – Twitter for Emergency? Ahha !

I had my hands on the new, much anticipated tool Microsoft Vine today and quite frankly, I’m still clueless as to why it exists.

Microsoft Vine is supposed to be a social networking tool for emergency or every day alerts. I prefer calling it Twitter for emergency.

This is what it does.

You register and enter your local address details, and the network of friends whom matters to you. You can add more places that matters to you and select a distance from the place where from you will be “feeded” with local news.

So let’s say you are registered with the Atlanta address and select a radius of 50 miles from where you prefer local news. You also will have all your friends invited in to Vine, who will be also using it like you, with preferences of their locations.

Now, you can send alerts in emergencies (or may be just like that) to everyone in your contacts list or by selecting groups from within.

So if you have ten folks in your “friends and family” list, you can send a message to the group and all of them will receive it by their preference, on email, sms etc.

The good thing is that you can send the alerts pretty much from any communication device just like in Twitter.

The interesting things about Vine (that might be USP’s)

- Set preferred destinations, and receive actual news alerts from these places.
They will be seen as blue icons at the map, with mouse over previews clicking on which will take you to the news site page in the browser. (Mostly reuters.com)

- Make groups of your friends and family (or anyone you care about) and send them group alerts
I really don’t get it why one has to use Vine to get this done. You could group sms them from your mobile phone in an emergency.

- Set up a social network within it
Again, why Vine ? I’m on Twitter and I have the whole bunch of friends out there. I couldn’t find one good reason why I should start it all over again on Vine. Heck, I won’t even be able to find ten people from Twitter, because I may not know their email ids (Vine require email ID’s to invite others).

So, is Vine really useful ?

Essentially, I found Vine useful for news alerts from local preferred destinations. Even though I could manage it with RSS alerts, this is more of a visual way of doing it and its effortless. Cheers to that.

But apart from it, Vine is no Twitter competitor. In fact, it looks like a tool that was inspired from Twitter, but built for a totally different purpose, that just sounds bizzare at least for now. Its like MS had their hands itching to make a tool, so they made one..and here’s it. Now don’t ask about how successful this guy is going to be.

Meanwhile I’ll look out for a review from a hardcore Microsoft fan. May be he can pull off something.

Here’s the Microsoft Vine official site (Cool graphics btw !)