Microsoft said on Friday that it will discontinue its Vine beta service on October 11.
In an email to testers, Microsoft said the Vine beta had received positive feedback but that the company had taken the decision to shutter the service. "The decision to discontinue future development of Microsoft Vine was not easily made. Multiple options were thoroughly explored and evaluated with rigor and in the end it was determined that Microsoft Vine is not sustainable as a standalone offering."
Microsoft originally unveiled Vine, its Twitter for emergencies, back in April 2009. Microsoft mainly marketed the product to emergency management officials. The software was a desktop client for Windows which allowed users to post information to it via e-mail or SMS. The application gathered local news from 20,000 sources and displayed it on a map. Like Twitter it allowed you to post short updates named alerts. Microsoft had originally planned to integrate Vine with Facebook and the social networking service, Twitter.
The departure of Vine marks another web casualty for the software giant. Microsoft killed off the Popfly web application in July 2009 and the Soapbox MSN video service a couple of months later. Recently, the software giant killed off its Kin range of Windows Phone handsets after only three months of sales.