ShoutEm - Roll your own Microblogging Social Networking

I'm usually fairly cynical with new applications, but there are always exceptions, and boy have I ever found one here! It's called ShoutEm and it's a resource that you can use to create your own microblogging resource - your own private Twitter in other words.

It's very simple to create a site; just follow through the templates, decide what you want to call it, colours and so on - or just accept one of the defaults and ShoutEm creates it for you. No technical knowledge required. The home page looks instantly recognisable if you're used to using a microblogging system - I've included a snippet below:

However, there are a few differences that you can see at once. I can embed photographs directly into posts, I can link directly to other resources such as YouTube, and play the video directly from the site.

It also has support for geo location sharing and mobile browser support (coming shortly apparently). You can do all the stuff that you'd expect, such as send @messages and direct messages. This is the free version, but they're also creating a commercial version that allows you to have your own adverts (adverts on free versions are down the right hand side of the screen as you'd expect).

There are a huge number of ways that I think this could be used. Immediately spring to mind creating one for a conference - this is going to clear a lot of conference tweets off people's main screens and will allow people to really focus just on the conference itself. Link into photographs, resources really easily. How about training courses? Create one for a training course and allow people to Shoutem during it to ask questions, share resources and experiences. Or subject areas, where librarians from similar specialities can get together to share information. How about parties? I have to say that I'm really quite interested in this one and I think it's going to be a real keeper.

If you want to explore, try out my InternetSearch Shoutem at http://internetsearch.shoutem.com/ and you should be able to take a peek. It's still in closed testing, but I believe that you should be able to register and then post to it. Any problems, send me an email and I can send you an invite to mine, though I don't have any invites to give out to let you create your own I'm afraid.