4 Microblogging Platforms For Running Your Own Community
With the success of Twitter, microblogging as a form of communication has exploded in popularity. Several new startups have capitalized on this and given internet users the ability to create their own microblogging communities. Here is a brief look at 4 microblogging platforms that can help you start your own microblogging community today.
Personal
ShoutEm
ShoutEm is a new service that allows you to host your own microblogging service. It focuses on customization, giving you lots of control over your community’s look and behavior. You can change the theme, enable Pownce-like multimedia “shouts”, and even add your own advertisements.
ShoutEm is free, but also offers a premium plan that unlocks the more advanced features like a custom domain, file sharing, and more customization options. Instead of paying a flat monthly fee for bundled-features, though, you pay on a per-feature basis.
Twingr
Like ShoutEm, Twingr allows you to create and manage your own microblogging community. It’s in a public alpha, but I wasn’t able to sign up and try it out as the allotted number of communities had already been created.
After watching the demo video, though, it appears that Twingr is less feature-rich and lacks many more powerful customization options. It doesn’t appear that you can upload photos, and there doesn’t seem to be a premium subscription of any kind available. Then again, Twingr is in alpha, so all these features may come eventually.
Business
Present.ly
Present.ly is a microblogging platform for small businesses and organizations that lets employees post updates about what they are working on, share files, and more. One nice feature of Present.ly is that it allows you to create groups, a useful tool for collaborating on projects. It also has some neat features that make asking and answering questions of fellow employees a breeze.
Present.ly offers a free plan with limited features for up to 5 users. After that, plans range from $14 to $99 a month.
SocialCast
Last but certainly not least, SocialCast is the most attractive and exciting service of the two. Packed with great features, SocialCast takes business communication beyond microblogging and includes a full range of social networking features. These include lifestreaming, microblogging, social-networking profiles, and even Yahoo Answers style pages for asking questions and getting answers.
SocialCast offers a free plan for up to 5 users. It’s $5 per user, per month after that. If you run a non-profit or very large company, SocialCast offers discounts and custom pricing options as well.
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Great post. Microblogging is undoubtedly becoming the preferred method of communication for many businesses, and hopefully mine will too someday. I also wanted to present the option for those wanting a custom install on their own server. Identi.ca, the open source Twitter clone, has its software freely available for download here: http://bit.ly/9lBt
One of the best things about it is that its API is almost fully Twitter compliant, so desktop clients like Twhirl and Spaz support it.
Thanks Sam, very useful!
Hi,
A very good note about these interesting platforms.
I kindly invite you to take a look at http://www.cirip.ro/?lg=en, a microblogging platform specially designed for education ( for courses enhancement, or for delivering entire online courses – http://tinyurl.com/2paperen ) and bussines, which provides the posibility to create communities as private/public groups.
Other facilities: * to embed in notes: images, audio and (live) video files, presentations, pdf, doc, xls files; * feeds monitoring; * statistics and visual representations: timeline, network, tagcloud for users and groups, etc.
A Happy New Year,
Carmen
Thanks Sam, I start to use Twitter.
I have book reviews about Twitter see at Http://hotbooketc.blogspot.com
We also see microblogging become more and more popular within companies. As for the case of our enterprise offering http://www.communote.com we see most of the benefit come from microsharing – sharing thoughts, ideas, comments, problems, status messages and even protocols and documentations. Hence, the microblog becomes some kind of organisational memory. The difference is that it fills just while you are getting your work done.