Whispurr Offers Simple Social Networking in 300 Characters

By Geoff Spick | Published Feb 3, 2010

Looks like Twitter (news, site) and its 140 character limit was not enough. Another upcoming social site/micro-post vendor called Whispurr wants you to expand your character limit horizons, while keeping it simple.

Get Social With the Top Cats

The world of social media tends to fall into (at least) two major buckets: either too simple (Twitter), or too complicated (the ever-expanding world of Facebook) — depending on how you look at it. Trying to edge for the simpler side, while offering a little more flexibility, here comes the very web 2.0-named Whispurr — the theme-based social messaging site that tries to keep things local and to the point.

It will offer local by being multi-lingual, allowing online translation and will make room for local companies, merchants and businesses to interact with the local population of users (extending it from the desktop to the mobile phone via SMS).

Flexibility comes in the form of content centralization, a strong emphasis on user privacy and much more is promised.

Behind the Scenes

Developed using Google's Application Engine and offering Open Social Alliance compatibility, Whispurr looks rather rough and ready at the moment. Even at this early stage, it offers support for:

#tags
the ability to import contacts and RSS feeds.

When the promised expansions turn up it has the potential to provide a more targeted approach to social interaction than Facebook and one that businesses can find more approachable, and easier to monetize.

In use, Whispurr is a model of simplicity, address your messages publicly, to one or many people. You can track down friends using your Gmail or Yahoo account lists and, once things get busy, you can create lists to keep your groups distinct. You can also make some messages read-only, so no one can reply. There is also an option to record a video via a web cam.

Currently, its population and message levels are expanding slowly, with specific communities such as the designer haunt of DeviantART and other groups taking an interest. We'll be keeping an eye on Whispurr as it grows to see if it breaks out from the other fledgling social sites, but for now if 140 isn't enough, then give Whispurr a go.