Microsoft Vine, designed exclusively to spread important information quickly in an emergency

Microsoft have officially unveiled a beta version of its new social network Vine

The social network enables you to transfer valuable news to small organizations such as your local book club. It is a lot like twitter, as you are able to send a similar number of characters as the micro blogging service and maintain contact with your friends. It is available via a downloadable app.

However, as with most beta introductions, it is only applicable to those in the US at this moment in time. Microsoft have tried to make the social network come across as a personal organizer to people who are involved in community activities or communicating with family and friends in the case of an emergency. But we all know this won’t apply to most of the users, a lot will try to use it as a way to attract traffic to their sites as is Twitter.

Microsoft Vine is supported by Windows XP with SP2 or Windows Vista 32- and 64-bit versions. As Vine is in beta, it is only available to 10,000 people who live in the Seattle.

To show you a demo of what Vine will look like , Microsoft have released a demo which you can view here.

Microsoft aim to make the service comfortable for users, similar to what facebook users are like who feel completely natural when talking to family, friends or the community. To do this they will try to integrate Vine with other services such as Twitter and landline phones.

How did Vine happen?

Strangely, Microsoft Vine came along in response to the Hurricane Katrina as it almost destroyed the whole of the Gulf Coast.  Microsoft have delivered this service after four years of researching and developing the network which will come in useful when people are suffering a country attack.

One of the videos Microsoft have posted to advertise the new service is quite farfetched and amusing. The video conveys one person stranded in snow and the other person, who is a woman, has an ill grandmother. As you would expect, they both use Microsoft Vine and help comes straight away and all is well, what else would you expect in an introductary video?

Microsoft Vine is not here in the UK just yet, which is quite annoying as I would be able to share more information about the new service. which incidentally is no-profit at the moment but surely has plans to monetize itself. I am positive there a number of people in the States using it right now, if anyone is, we would be glad to hear your comments!