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Brier Dudley's blog | Microsoft debuts Vine in Seattle: Twitter+Facebook on steroids | Seattle Times Newspaper
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/technologybrierdudleysblog/2009134578_microsoft_debuts_vine_in_seatt.html

Thanks to my very good friend @ikepigott, I heard about this Microsoft Vine project. It looks like a social networking aggregrator service that pulls information from tens of thousands of traditional media sources, as well as new media (your facebook and twitter friends for example) and presents it in a dashboard fashion. The new part is that it allows you to send alerts to groups of people you've identified in your social network (online and offline). They're pushing it out to the emergency management field now as beta testers. I just installed my copy tonight and will start playing around with it. If it looks useful, I'll be sure to post on it.
"Vine is a hyperlocal, personalized message and alert system. It's intended to be a dashboard that people can use to keep tabs of their family, friends, activities and major events in their community."
Twitter+Facebook on steroids?
Vine is a hyperlocal, personalized message and alert system. It's intended to be a dashboard that people can use to keep tabs of their family, friends, activities and major events in their community. The dashboard -- which appears as a widget on a PC screen -- displays a map of the user's community and the status of their contacts.
It’s the most secure distribution version of Windows XP ever produced by Microsoft: More than 600 settings are locked down tight, and critical security patches can be installed in an average of 72 hours instead of 57 days. The only problem is, you have to join the Air Force to get it. The Air Force persuaded Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to provide it with a secure Windows configuration that saved the service about $100 million in contract costs and countless hours of maintenance. At a congressional hearing this week on cybersecurity, Alan Paller, research director of the Sans Institute, shared the story as a template for how the government could use its massive purchasing power to get companies to produce more secure products. And those could eventually be available to the rest of us.
Could be pretty cool.
officials are already trying to glean information from services such as Twitter and Facebook, but it's challenging because they're basically sending limited streams of text. Vine "provides an avenue to consolidate some of that information and analyze it in a more comprehensive way." "The underlying technology, where it provides a more structured data form, will long-term be a very valuable asset, whether it's generated from Microsoft or others,'' he said. Seattle is the first place Vine will be publicly available. During a testing period that begins today, people can sign up at www.vine.net to be among more than 10,000 testers the company hopes to enlist. Similar tests will begin shortly in a rural community in the Midwest and an isolated island community, the locations of which haven't been disclosed yet.