Does Anyone Care About Microsoft Anymore?

Well, I just couldn't resist writing about this...reportedly Microsoft is releasing a new service called "Vine," which is described as a service that allows people to:

“Stay in touch with family and friends, be informed when someone you care about needs help. Get involved to create great neighborhoods, communities or causes. You select the people and places you care about most. Use alerts, reports and your personal dashboard to stay in touch, informed and involved.

“Information associated with the places you have chosen will appear on your map, including articles culled from 20,000 local and national news sources as well as public safety announcements from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Information associated with the people you care about who are in your Vine network will appear on the dashboard too. You will know when they send you an alert, post a report or update their Facebook status information.”

But I can't help but wonder if people would actually use this service. Hate to say it, but I think Twitter and Facebook kind of spoiled the party for them--how is Microsoft going to convince people to use Vine when they're already twittering and status updating amongst the people they're connected to? Why would you try to go to a completely new community, and try to drag your friends to it when they're already on Facebook, Twitter, or a half dozen other social networking sites?

Unless Vine leverages some new way of allowing people to communicate to each other (ie like how Twitter came up with the concept of micro-blogging), I just don't see it taking off. I'll reserve judgement until I see the actual service...but it doesn't look good so far.