A few weeks ago I wrote about Nokia’s range of lifetracking programs for their smartphones. At the time I was looking forward to the launch of viNe, Nokia’s new geolocative media sharing application. This week it’s finally gone public and I’ve been playing with it over the past couple of days on my N82 phone.
Similar to Nokia’s existing Sports Tracker app, viNe allows you to record journeys using GPS data. As you move a line is drawn on the map on your phone’s screen. Take a picture with your phone’s camera and it appears on the map. The same happens with videos you record and music you listen to, they’re all added to your ‘Vine’/journey. This stuff is nothing new – Sports Tracker has been doing this for months. Just like Sports Tracker, viNe allows you to upload your journeys to Nokia’s website to allow others to see them.
viNe has been described as a “replacement” for Sports Tracker. That’s missing the point, I think. Nokia really should keep the two running side-by-side. Sports Tracker is, as you’d expect, aimed at people involved in sports. It refers to journeys as ‘Workouts’ and tracks your speed, altitude and step count in addition to recording your photos, videos and listening habits.
viNe, meanwhile, is aimed at people who just want to share their journeys online. The phone app is beautifully designed and simple to use. The service’s website is just as nice to use although at the moment it’s this website that’s the problem.
From the main website you can explore all the ‘Vines’ people have created around the world, watching their videos, admiring their photos and laughing at their poor music taste. The trouble is, that’s about it. There’s no way to access only your own Vines, you have to search for them among everyone else’s. At the moment that’s fine. In Manchester, for example it seems there’s only one other user of the service apart from me. When the service becomes better known searching for your own Vines will become increasingly difficult. Nokia needs to remedy this quickly.
Another problem is privacy. As Ms Jen over at Darla Mack has noted, there’s no way to control who sees your Vines. Maybe I just want a journey visible by my family. At the moment that’s not possible. Ms Jen suggests a Flickr-style four-tier privacy control. Sports Tracker has ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ settings for workouts, so it’s certainly possible.
Sharing a Vine is difficult at the moment. Each Vine has its own URL but it’s not immediately clear that this is the case (I only found out by experimenting). You can email the Vine to people but better sharing options are a ‘must-do’ for the development team. I’ve heard something about a widget for sharing Vines on blogs. The sooner that arrives the better.
Aside from these issues and a few teething problems (the photos from my first Vine never uploaded and sometimes Vines seem to disappear from the website temporarily) I’m impressed by viNe. There are suggestions on the All About Symbian forum that viNe is deliberately under-developed because it’s more aimed at marketing the power of Nokia’s smartphones than providing a feature-rich addition to Nokia’s suite of online Ovi services. I hope that’s not true as the potential for the service is enormous.
Travel journalism can benefit from it, for example, and anyone who just wants to keep a digital memento of an important or unusual journey will be reaching for their Nokia. Once users can have better control over their journeys and sharing is easier it’ll be a service I’ll use regularly.
If you have a compatible phone and want to give viNe a go you can download it from the Nokia viNe site.
