With Shout Mobile App, You Can Shout To Be Heard In Your Locality

With Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn already on the web and WhatsApp on mobile, I wouldn’t really want another app for connecting with more friends to show them how happening my life is. But, what if there is an app which goes beyond the idea of adding and waiting for friend requests or even getting blocked at a later stage. The app’s only purpose is to rant… err just to shout.

Shout a mobile first app allows you to just rant, comment and share with people in nearby locations. Available only on Android it excited me for the simple reason of not having to add anyone as so-called friends and conversations being discovered in a radius of 10 Kms.

The app on firing up provides Facebook and Google for social logins, I went ahead with the Facebook login and within no time I had the below screen on my mobile.

Without knowing much about the app I went ahead and raised my first shout on the app. Sending a shout out is fairly easy as updating your status message but with a word limit restriction of 150 characters (Twitter inspired?) I’m not complaining either. One can upload pictures, files and attach a hashtag with their message. The hashtag concept is the same as Twitter, it helps your shouts to be discovered. Once your shout is done it gets added to your feed.

The next thing you notice on the app is My Feed which is basically the shouts of people in your radius. You can notice the app lists shouts along with the distance. While you are browsing through the feed you can add an Echo, Shut Up and Comment on someones shout out. Echo is basically providing your support and getting the shout discoverable while Shut Up is the opposite; when you don’t like something on the network.

The team at Shout talks about why they opted for a feature like Shut Up in their blog.

“Shut-up acts as a strong moderating agent existing within the ecosystem, discouraging users to pollute in an otherwise a potentially very useful platform in the becoming.”

However, once you report a shout, the content gets deleted only when the team has reviewed it. Besides the app provides an option to mark a content if found abusive or marketing in nature. The user who posts the content gets notified and the team deletes it, if found abusive after review. In future the app will also introduce blocking users feature if the content is found abusive.

Apart from the feed feature, one can tap on the top left category icon to get an update about the profile. The cool feature updates about the activities on the app in a neat way. Besides you can click on My Shouts to get a detailed look at your profile. Additionally, if you tap on any image you would see the startup’s interest in building a design rich product. The below snapshot gives the glimpse of both the features.

Finally you are left with settings where you can define your shout fetch distance, maximum being 10Km and enable/disable push notifications.

Shout app – good to give a shot?

Definitely for its simplicity, ease of use and amazing design. Till the time I was on the app, the experience was great. The startup has indeed brainstormed while designing the app and for that they need a pat on their back.

One might argue that the concept of location-based apps is not new but I am glad it is not another Foursquare with tapping location and gamification. Even though the app’s concept is not a new one, for me the simplicity and no hassle of making friends on Shout win.

Hashtags or the search feature is one of the strong base of this app but it will show potential with an increase in usage.

Which brings us to a big question of user adoption for most Indian social networks, because we are busy spending time at other established networks. It would be great to know what the founding members have in mind to tackle this problem and how would they want to build up the discovery layer powered by localization on the app.

I like Twitter for its simplicity and so is the case with Shout app. However, with the way Twitter is getting hungry for reach and moulding it into another Facebook clone, I may have to look for options.

Anyways do give it a try and let me know if you like the concept of Shout?

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1k0FOKq