Sprouter – Twitter for Entrepreneurs and Collaborators
Here’s a nutshell explanation of what Sprouter.com is: it’s Twitter and message forums rolled into
one. I actually thought Sprouter was going to have something to do with growing plants. Silly me.
The interface is basically Twitter in green, the messages you can type (or are reading) are 140-or-less, and it’s a social networking platform for entrepreneurs and project collaborators. The real difference between Sprouter and Twitter however, is not the networking or the business-focus. It’s the forum-like discussion trends.
This might make more sense once you see how Sprouter works.
You start by signing up and building a profile. The key question in your profile is “What are you working on?” This is where you can list your current project(s) and hopefully start conversations with others who view your profile and are interested in your work. Obviously, putting “working on sCommerce.com” is not going to get as much interest as “writing about Sprouter for sCommerce.com” will.
You otherwise use the site like Twitter, though you can join conversations without having to be friends with someone to see their tweets, so you can see the current stream from everyone or people in specific niches (entrepreneurs, developers, and so forth). You can also narrow the field with searches.
There are a lot of other tools built in as well, making it easier to narrow your searches, categorizing your followers and those you’re following, etc. Searching for people who have similar interests is easy, for instance, thanks to the Topics and Events tools.
While Sprouter is basically just Twitter, it has a lot of the tools that I wish Twitter did have built-in. For a 10,000 words crammed into 5 minutes presentation on how Sprouter works, watch this vid:
She seriously needs to lay off the coffee.
