Microsoft Vine

» see vine.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

vine never got out of seattle. it was a region-coded product even within the united states, a private beta you had to live in the right zip code to even apply for. by the time it shut down in october 2010, almost nobody outside the original ten thousand beta testers had ever logged in. that is not the kind of footprint that crosses an atlantic to a turkish dial-up household, and it did not.

the idea was earnest. microsoft watched what happened in louisiana during hurricane katrina, watched people lose their phones and their power and their ability to find anyone, and decided to build a piece of software for the next time. vine was a downloadable windows client plus sms plus email plus voice fallback, all hanging on a personal dashboard that would tell you which of your contacts had checked in safe and which had not. it pulled alerts from over twenty thousand sources, including noaa and the national center for missing and exploited children. it shared a name with nothing in particular, years before twitter bought a different vine.

the limited beta opened on 28 april 2009. microsoft hoped to find ten thousand testers in seattle, with rural and island pilots to follow. those follow-on pilots never opened. on 11 october 2010 microsoft posted that vine was being discontinued. the wording was the gentle corporate kind. "we explored multiple options, but it was not sustainable as a standalone offering." the service was switched off the same day.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

the problem with an emergency network is that it cannot be useful on a tuesday. if you only log in during a hurricane you forget your password, do not have the client installed, and your friends never signed up because they did not live in seattle. networks need everyday traffic to make their disaster traffic possible. vine had no everyday traffic by design. it solved a real problem in a way that could not get to scale.

~ what it became ~

microsoft folded what it had learned into a successor app called helpbridge, announced in january 2013 for windows phone, android, and ios. helpbridge was smaller, did less, and was discontinued quietly some years later. the disaster-comms category itself never really got built. the next time a hurricane took out the gulf coast power grid, people used facebook's safety check and twitter, the same way they had for the storm that had inspired vine in the first place.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »