If you mashed up Tumblr, Pinterest, Paper.li and Storify, you’d get something close to RebelMouse.
RebelMouse
The new Web service, whose namesake mascot could be the mutinous younger brother of Mighty Mouse, uses the links and photos you share on Twitter or Facebook to populate a Web page.
The product’s raison d’être goes something like this: 1) Everybody wants to have a website 2) Nobody knows what to put on their website because they use social media now instead of blogging 3) So why not use your social media activity to power your website.
For an individual journalist, RebelMouse can build a website that harnesses all your social media curation work into a Web product (see mine as an example).
You can imagine how a prolific, Twitter-centric journalist like NPR’s Andy Carvin could fill a page with news.
For a news organization, RebelMouse could also be a tool for aggregation projects. One page could represent all the content your news staff is tweeting. Another one could pull in content from a hashtag for a crowdsourcing project.
Visually, RebelMouse looks a lot like Pinterest. Functionally, it is in the same product space as Storify, but different in key ways:
- More permanence. Whereas you might build a different Storify each day, RebelMouse is set up more as a lasting presence that updates over time.
- More automation. RebelMouse can be totally hands-off, automatically updating with everything that is tweeted by a certain user or hashtag. Alternatively, you can have RebelMouse save all imported items as drafts so you choose which ones it uses later.
- No embedding, yet. I’m told it will eventually be possible to embed your RebelMouse stream elsewhere, but it doesn’t seem to be a launch feature.
Pricing is extremely affordable — free for basic usage, and if you want to use the site at a custom domain name (instead of rebelmouse.com/username) it’s $3 a month for an individual or $3 a week for a company.
The product creators include ex-HuffPost co-founder Ken Lerer and CTO Paul Berry, under their Soho TechLabs incubator. I’ve been trying it myself, and it’s worth experimenting to see what uses you can come up with.
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