Twingr is a brand new startup which essentially lets you create your own microblogging community. The site slots directly in with the continuing craze for microblogs and lifestreaming, and ways to make a viable business out of the two.
For those of you unfamiliar with microblogging, it’s simply a way to post short nuggets of thoughts, ideas, links to a website where they can be shared with others. The largest of these websites is undoubtedly Twitter, although there are many competitors along the lines of Plurk, Identi.ca, Rejaw and Techcrunch 50 winner Yammer.
Twingr is clearly aiming to be a “Ning.com for Microblogs”, allowing for anyone to create their own Twitter to share with their personal friends and colleagues in matter of minutes.
With an awful name and not the prettiest of sites you may assume Twingr’s functionality to be much of the same – however Twingr’s core features seem to work very well (at least for me). Posting is a breeze and you can create multiple communities switching between each very easily. Direct messages are part and parcel of the feature set and there are a number of privacy settings to play with as well. Unfortunately there is no mention of an instant messenger integration, mobile/text features or post via email – however it’s early days and let’s hope these arrive soon.
There is no word out on this yet however I would be curious to learn whether they are planning on launching a “premium” version of the site or whether they’ll solely rely on advertising. Furthermore, would community admins be allowed to monetize the service for themselves should they so wish?
To sum up, I think the main benefit as an individual and business owner is the idea that I could create multiple communities within one login – essentially a twitter with groups. How long have we been waiting for Twitter to implement that?
I have posted Twingr’s demo video below, what do you think?
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXVVdrrqAg4]
This is good for using inside companies that have strict policies about employee communications.
Ernie, true – but Yammer.com offers a similar product which technically is more private.
I’m currently testing Yammer at the company I work for. Works pretty good and is simple to use, even for those who don’t have any Twitter experience. A good feature of Yammer is that it automatically allows people with the same domain address, didn’t find out so far if Twingr also supports a similar feature?
Cool, I have a thought of building a similar site in China. China is always a good place for such kind of sites.
I started using this yesterday, and its been down today.
What was scary is that they send your passwords in URL… so its totally not secure.
That for me is a no go… Hopefully they change it..
M
This is pretty much Twitter with groups, but I believe FriendFeed does the same thing (but it’s public). The only concern I have is that most people still don’t know (or don’t use) Twitter, Friendfeed, Plurk, etc. So, while i think group based micro-blogging is cool, I dont’ think it’ll be very useful because of potential adoption problems.
If you are going to use group-based messaging, email listservs, message boards and news feeds are easier with the masses. At Convos (http://www.convos.com), we use email listservs and mailing lists to handle group communication.