Want a Twitter All for Yourself? Shout’Em Can Give You One – We Have Invites

Over the week I have been given an opportunity to play with a private beta of a new European startup called Shout’Em. The startup is intended for anyone to create and manage a microblogging community like Twitter or Pownce or any other Twitter clone you have already seen.

The team calls Shout’Em a “Ning for Twitters” and this is the best description probably: same as you create a full-functional social network on Ning, you can create a social network focused strictly on microblogging here on Shout’Em and I can certainly confirm it is a nice way to create a Twitter for yourself if you actually need one. In fact, you can create more than one network for different purposes and manage them all here.

The best part about a microblogging network you create on Shout’Em is that it is fully customizable as you can use a URL of your choice, a selection of themes or your own CSS to customize the looks, etc. With plenty of customization tools available you can even make your network on Shout’Em look like it is an integral part of your other existing web properties which might be particularly useful for businesses trying to communicate with their customers in this new creative manner.

But the most interesting part is that you can define the functionality of your network as you want it to be. You can choose if you want to let your users have private profiles and use replies, if you will let your users customize their profiles and send files to each other - everything is absolutely customizable. For those users not sure about what functionality is actually needed and which is not, there are three defaults - simple microblogging, rich microblogging, and private network. Simple microblogging will provide you with a network very similar to Twitter in its functionality while the rich microblogging resembles Pownce more and adds features like attachment of files and links to messages. The private network will obviously build a close-walled community for you.

Another good part is that your network will even feature a friend finder so that people could easily find and follow (or send invitations) to their friends from the email contacts (Yahoo Mail and Gmail) or from their social networking contacts (only Facebook is available for mow). This will ensure that people will be able to easily grow their microblogging communities here on Shout’Em.

The monetization model is pretty straightforward here with both free and paid-for accounts available. Free customers can create networks with similar functionality but their networks will show ads served by Shout’Em. Paid accounts stipulate for use of a custom domain name instead of yournetwork.shoutem.com and the overall richer functionality. What’s more, you can even display your own ads here and monetize your network if you feel it can make you some extra revenue.

All in all, Shout’Em seems to look like a great idea and I do believe it can take off in a manner quite similar to what we have seen on Ning as I can see quite a number of potential uses for Shout’Em networks - from private communications within a team or a group of people sharing certain interests to open chat rooms for discussions on just about anything accompanied with sharing links or whole documents of interest to the entire community. But of course the most important issue here will be scalability of the Shout’Em platform because for people to use them, they will need to be sure of reliability and performance of the platform - especially if they use it for some business purpose.

If you want to try it out for yourself and grab your own community to roll out your own Twitter or Pownce, simply go to Shout’Em website and create your account using “doneright” as the invitation code. You will also find the Profy network on Shout’Em here if you are willing to take part in our very own microblogging community. And do share what you think about the platform with the service’s team as feedback is the most important thing for any application in private beta.