A friend of mine from back in the college days of my life has recently launched a new Internet forum… with a slight twist. The project, called Internet Shout is a voice based forum system where registered users have the ability to record voice messages into a thread instead of the legacy text style forums.

The site has been running now for a week or so, and its founder has even appeared in a ‘The Register‘ article detailing the efforts of this new social community attempt.

I spent a few hours browsing around the site listening through some of the threads, which is designed and constructed extremely well, rely’s heavily on Adobe Flash to allow access to content. Overall I have to admit I was quite impressed with the concept of a voice forum, and quality of the voice recordings (albeight some of the users sound a little strange lol), it defiantly fits into the ‘new and unexplored’ territory category, pulling another concept out of the big bag which is web 2.0 goodies. Dozens of categories have been created to allow users to post their thoughts and comments, and even create their own threads for the world to see. One of the more impressive features which this system currently boasts is the running conversation system, which is essentially ‘Private Message’ incorporating the voice message system, this is quite a cool way to keep in touch with your personal friends on internet shout, though i think it would be far more useful as a Facebook Application, allowing you to do this sort of thing with your larger base of friends, rather than just the Internet Shout group, which is bound to be smaller !

This said, I cant help but think about some of the reasons why something like this hasn’t graced the Internet with its presence before, for starters its quite established that the Internet is a place of anonymity, where users still are not 100% comfortable sharing all the personal details of their lives, and although facebook is somewhat challenging this conception by fast becoming the stalker central of the planet, even it has not attempted to pull voice chat into the concept. Possibly i’m being a little too paranoid in my aging years, but I cant see myself verbally recording my thoughts and comments onto an Internet forum. And For anyone who regularly uses legacy text forums i’m sure you have come across the ‘forum ass’ who responds to everyone’s comments with nothing but sarcasm and general put-downs about your opinion, cant say i’m looking forward to coming across that chap in a verbal style of the system, for example if this guy signed up

Being so reliant on voice also introduces a slight problem with abuse, within many of the text based forum systems, such as PHPBB, there are inbuilt controls to filter out offensive language and inappropriate content. Although my understanding of the back end system is quite limited at this point, I cant believe that there is any form of automated moderation in play (a system to analyse vocal voice samples for specific words), after all programs such as Dragon speaking have been around for years, and still require significant training to recognise even the simple sentences. Hence peer moderation from other users and moderators is quite possibly the only real way to control content on this style of system, which is bound to be sluggish at best, and introduce inconsistency in thread topics when an users inappropriate comment is removed by administrators.

All these things aside, its clear to see that systems like this carry with them their own positive assets, long have been the days where written communication lacks the emotions which precipitated it, whereby comments left on forums have prompted misunderstandings from other users. Voice systems such as this have the potential to reduce that considerably, though at the sacrifice of some more privacy. Ill be keeping a close eye on this little project, potential and future development is defiantly on the horizon !