Plans for the future

As we’re coming closer to the end of this year, it is good to set up the plans for the next one. Last year was very exciting for all of us, as we’ve seen ShoutEm growing very fast from the moment it was made public at the LeWeb ‘08 conference exactly a year ago. At this moment, we host more than 10000 mobile social networks, with that number raising every day. The whole team worked very hard to introduce some new features, and bring the concepts of some new interesting features which we will develop in 2010.

What are our plans for the 2010?

1. We plan to position ShoutEm as a service for creating mobile social networks.

Niche microblogging definitely has a bright future, but there is a huge space for a mobile social networks. As smart phones are gaining more and more market share, we think that we can, and we should offer a service that can connect all mobile users and offer them a new experience. We’ve already started with developing applications for the mobile operating systems, with iPhone, BlackBerry and Java applications already available for use.

2. Location aware applications and networks

With most of the smart phones already equipped with some kind of a GPS device, we want to take the opportunity and use a GPS data. We plan to make a service which will be able to create location-aware shouts. What do we need that for? Wouldn’t be nice to come to a restaurant and using your mobile phone see all shouts ever written in that restaurant? We also plan to add some additional features on the top of that service, like rewards, titles, etc.

We will also display a list of points of interests near a user, which he can use to find any spot that he needs.

3. Augmented reality

On the top of location-aware shouts feature, we will include support for augmented reality. Users will be able to see all shouts written at a certain place just by pointing their mobile device camera at that place. It will also display a list of your friends who recently visited that place, with their avatar and information displayed in a “bubble”.

4. New design

Exclusively on ShoutEm blog, we present you some screenshots of new designs for ShoutEm networks. Please note that this is only a proposal, some things might change, but you can see a general design and all new features integrated in it. Also please note that these are not all designs that we plan to have.

With new design and features, we are trying to provide network administrators a way to create more Facebook-like mobile social networks. Microblogging will still be one of ShoutEm’s core features, but with integration of all features mentioned above, we think it’s time to redesign our networks to provide better user experience for our users. These changes will affect current html code, and also some parts of CSS files. Network administrators will have to change their current CSS files if they want to achieve the same look of some parts of their mobile social networks as before. We will give some time to network administrators to adopt to new html and CSS codes, so we won’t enable new design immediately.

This is a huge improvement for the ShoutEm and network administrators, as we’ll be able to provide new features and a new user experience for our users. It will also provide better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for ShoutEm networks, which can help network administrators to have much more members. We strongly believe that our new features will help network administrators to create fantastic mobile social networks, attract much more users and boost network traffic.

Click on a thumbnail to see a picture in original size, and please post your opinion in comments.

What else do you want to see? Are there some new features that you want ShoutEm to implement? Do you have some idea for us? Please give us some feedback in your comments.