NPR Mobile Web has been redesigned for better cross-platform functionality. And its station list has been expanded beyond the 55 it had at launch to include all NPR member stations.

NPR News app, which should be available to Android users later this month, is similar in user functionality to the broadcaster’s iPhone application. But unlike the iPhone app, NPR News app for Android is open and can be customized and improved upon by member stations.

“With the Android app, we can let the stations incorporate their own apps into ours,” Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s SVP/GM of digital media, told Paid Content. “Some stations are more advanced digitally than others. We’re working with them about becoming more robust providers of local news, which will keep them relevant. And we can share our programming and theirs on one app. That expands the opportunities for all of us.”

The investment, whose size the Time Warner Inc. Web site declined to disclose, comes as news organizations seek more local information about high school sports, eateries and social events, in which they see an untapped market. Outside.In and a growing cadre of start-ups either hire people to write neighborhood news, or collect and organize dispatches from local citizens, news outlets or bloggers.

MSNBC.com, a joint venture of NBC Universal and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), this summer acquired EveryBlock, which feeds crime reports, restaurant health inspections and other data to news organizations’ Web sites. AOL Inc. recently acquired the local-news network Patch.

CNN.com, which is part of Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner Broadcasting, plans to carry the Outside.In dispatches on its own Web site—the biggest push into local news so far by one of the most popular national news outlets in the country.

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Announced today and scheduled for beta in May, Vine is a hyperlocal messaging and alert system intended to be used to share information during a crisis. Properly configured, it will gather local news and public safety announcements along with location information, reports and messages from friends–eventually even those posted to other services, like Facebook and Twitter–into a handy little dashboard. This being Microsoft (MSFT), that dashboard will be proprietary and require PCs running XP SP2 or Vista and 600 MB of hard disk space.

So really, Vine is not so much a societal network for people you care about, but for the PC users you care about. A proprietary disaster messaging system… sigh, only from Microsoft.

Anyway…. It’s an interesting idea–not so much as the “societal network” Microsoft touts it as but as a cunning end run around established services. Twitter and Facebook are fun, recreational, but Vine has gravitas. It’s the network you turn to when things fall apart–assuming you meet the proper system requirements–because it consolidates the Tweets and status updates you actually want to read with need-to-know public safety announcements. Of course, Microsoft won’t admit that. “We intend this to be a service of services–to not replace social networking tools that exist today, but embrace them,” Tammy Savage, Microsoft Vine general manager, told TechFlash.

Yeah, embrace and extend and… well, we all know what comes next.