Chime In - a quick review

 

Just when you thought you had all things social covered, some bugger goes and launches another one.

Its called 'Chime In'

It's billed a a cross between Facebook, twitter and Quora.

The main things to note are:

• It's an 'interest network' I.e conversations revolve around interest areas and topics allowing you to talk to experts on subjects. The founder, internet entrepreneur Bill Gross describes it as an ‘interest graph’ like the social graph of Facebook, but this is interest not people.
•  It's funded by ad rev, but, here's the cunning part, the users get a share of the ad revenue from your contributions. If you create  Community  and serve ads to it, you get all the cash. Which is nice. 

Sections are My Chimes, My Interests, My Communities and Popular. You can have a normal stream of Chimes, a bit like tweets, Communities are like Facebook Groups or LinkedIn. You upload your Chimes and tag them to topics. You can save Chimes and review them later. 

IMHO its not as frivolous as Twitter, not really about your friends [Facebook] and not really about pimping yourself out [LinkedIn]. It reminds me a bit of Google Knol, [if anyone remembers that].  Its owned by UberMedia, the company that bought Mixx and closed it down. Initial impressions are that Chime In is Mixx reborn.

Its early days, but I think it will be a good place to people to learn things.

From a brands POV, it good be a good place to engage with experts for influencer relations campaigns.

Brands can have a Page and run ads on their content rich Page. The brands get the revenue from those ads, motivating the brand to make their Page really compelling, and not just full of marketing puff.

I'm have more of a play over the next few weeks and let you know anything interesting.