“Katrina” was one of the most deadliest and costliest “force majeure” US has ever witnessed in its hurricane history. The most severe loss of life and property damage occurred in New Orleans, the state of Louisiana. During this difficult times, there was an utmost chaos among people to keep in touch with their loved ones and know their whereabouts. They wished, if there was a better system which could help. The evolution of “Vine” is the response from Microsoft, just to have that wish come true.

Microsoft Vine is a social media application which taps the strengths of Facebook like apps and “Twitter”.

I’m one of the invitees to beta test Vine and the first look is definitely impressive. I can foresee a lot of potential how this product could evolve, even though initial idea is pretty much limited to so-called “Crisis Management”.

Once the vine client is installed on the PC, the interface is somewhat similar to “MSN Messenger”. A successful login (Windows Live-ID is required) into MSN vine system prompts the user to pick a one time 4 digit pin as shown in figure 1. This PIN is stored with your contact information in something called “Vitals” and used to ensure that your vine messages can only be sent from the email accounts you register with vine.

Figure 1

Vine basically has 3 main tabs - Vitals, Places and People as shown in figure 2.

Figure 2

“Vitals” is basically where you put all your personal information such as, address, e-mail address and personal pin. The registered e-mail address is where you receive all the alerts in emergencies.You can add contacts from other social media tools such as facebook, linkedin and windows live as shown in figure 3. I’m sure others may well be on the list in the final release of vine.

 
Figure 3

“Places” is basically your personal network you build inside vine to keep in touch with your friends and relatives. As you can see in figure 4, I have couple of places (My Home and My Work Place) added and it is listed under “Places I Care About”. While creating your network, it also allows you to specify the radius of the location you are interested in getting the news from. The small little blue boxes on the map are the surrounding news you are interested in for that specific location.

Figure 4

“People” tab allows to add all your friends, relatives and/or create groups (Emergency Contact, My Family Members etc).

The other two tabs - “Send Alert” and “Post Report” allows you to send alerts to your loved ones and post messages about your status to only your contacts or groups.

As you can see in figure 5, I got an alert from my family to “come home ASAP” and I responded that I’m safe. All these communications are sent to both email and mobile phone numbers you registered under vine. A member in your vine network can even post a report to announce their current status. The status automatically updated on the recipients dashboard as in figure 6.

 
Figure 5

Figure 6

In crisis situations, access to a PC is highly unlikely but you can still send and post alerts to your emergency contacts via a mobile phone. You can keep an emergency card (figure 7) in your wallet to send your status messages via mobile phones either as text or e-mails in a vine specific format. You can even send alerts to a specific group of people which is built by you as part of your vine network.

 
Figure 7

Vine has a very good potential on how you can share information privately with people you care about- details of your upcoming adventure; an event in the neighborhood; breaking news and most important, that you are safe and well in any situation. Even though it has a very good way to build your social network and gives the topmost importance for your personal crisis management; dialing 911 always supersedes all these methods and indeed your last resort to get help.

Currently, the service is limited to US and it’ll be interesting to see how this would evolve globally.

Closing note - “Microsoft Vine is indeed a little social media application with enormous potential to keep families together.”