Shouting: The Social Media Din Just Got Louder

Submitted by John on Sat, 02/05/2011 - 3:05am
in

The latest attempt to revolutionize social media is ShoutOmatic (http://shoutomatic.com/).

This is the audio version of Twitter. Record a short message (30 seconds or less), post it on the web for all to hear. You can also tweet it, share it on Facebook, download it, e-mail it or, watch as I use it to slice through this aluminum can without dulling the blade.

After listening to several shouts, including one from John Oates (sans Hall), I greet this innovation with a resounding yawn.

Not that it’s not an interesting idea. It’s just that listening to people I don’t know ramble on about stuff I don’t care about is torturous. Flashback: I’m five there are no kids for miles and I’m being made to sit at the dinner table amongst adults addling on about their angina.

Admittedly, I said the same thing about Twitter when it first came out. What was I thinking?

The beauty about Twitter is I can scan an entire screen of tweets in a few seconds, pick out what interests me ignore what doesn’t. I can search them or jump to the url at the end of the tweet.

With shouts you have to actually spend the time to listen. If it’s 30 seconds long it takes 30 seconds to listen to. If there’s some juicy tidbit at the end you’ll never know unless you wade through the first insipid 20 seconds.

I can’t imagine my kids “shouting” either. They don’t even talk. They text. I’m willing to bet the average high schooler has texted the equivalent of having written, read, edited, rewritten and produced a sequel for War and Peace. Kids think the number pad on their phone was made for abbreviating words like “to”, “for”, “ate” and my favorite, “gr8”.3

Don’t write ShoutOmatic off yet, though. A lot of great ideas were written off when they first came out – Twitter, e-mail, the personal computer, even the television (why would you want to see what you can just as easily listen to on the radio?).

Somebody will come up with a novel use for this or invent a clever twist and we’ll all be off to the next revolution.

Note to the ShoutOmatic people: Here’s an idea: speed-shouting. Crank those shouts at double or quadruple time. Even if the shout is completely lame it’ll at least sound really funny.