Tumblr + Facebook/Twitter = RebelMouse

Tumblr + Facebook/Twitter = RebelMouse:
There are many things that I share on the world wide web with my friends and other people that I may or may not know. I share things on Facebook, Twitter, pictures through Instagram, posts here on Web.AppStorm and iPhone.AppStorm. I am also sure that many of you have your variety of social sites that you share things to as well. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was one place to go to get all of your status updates, pictures, videos and anything else that you share instead of having to visit four different sites?
Well, a new web application called RebelMouse gives you this opportunity and much more. It is right now in beta, so it can be a little rough around the edges at times, but it is a very cool service. Think of it as Tumblr meets Facebook and Twitter, sound interesting? Well, read on to learn more about this cool little app.

Combining Your Social Networks

When you first go to the site, you really can’t tell what the service actually does, and you are asked to sign in with Twitter or Facebook. Trust me, you are going to want to sign in with either one and check out the service. With that being said, you are going to want to connect your Facebook and Twitter to RebelMouse if you use both services.

My RebelMouse Landing Page

RebelMouse will do all the magic after that in which it will take your Facebook posts as well as your tweets and organize them into a good looking splash page for you. You can customize the page by deciding what Facebook pages you want to post and also what tweets you want to show as well. You can also change the design and layout of your page with any one of the templates that the app provides for you.

Selecting what tweets I want to show

There is even deeper customization where you can change specific posts from Facebook or Twitter that you have on your RebelMouse page. For example, you can move posts around on the page, and you can also freeze a post so that is stays in that specific position. Posts can also be edited if you want them to, and so if you have a post from Twitter that is on your page, maybe you want to change the title, you can do that. Lastly, Rebelmouse also gives you analytics on that specific post by telling you how many times it has been clicked and whether it has been shared to other social networks.

Analytics for a specific post

Create Your Own Posts

RebelMouse is definitely not a one trick pony in that you can post more than just from your Facebook or Twitter. You can also create your own posts where you can add text, photos, videos, and a picture album. Combine this with the fact that you can create numerous sites, this definitely opens up the possibility of making your own blog similar to Tumblr.

Adding a post

Rebelmouse also has its own bookmarklet, where you can use to add interesting articles to one of your pages. For example, lets say you created a page on RebelMouse that is strictly to do with this year’s presidential election, when you come across an article that you want to put on that Rebelmouse page, you can use the bookmarklet to easily get it to post to that page.

Using bookmarklet to add a post

Potential Uses

Speaking of uses, the more I started to play around with RebelMouse, the more ideas I could start to come up with for using the service. There are a variety of things you can use your RebelMouse page for. You can be as simple as you want and just connect your social networks to it and share that out with people. But, you can also create your own blog if you want. I have toyed with using it as a landing page to put all of my pictures of my son so that way my parents and friends can just go there. Like I had also mentioned previously, it can also be used as a way to collect interesting articles from around the web. I can definitely see using something like this in my classroom, where my students can use it as a bookmarking page to save all their articles for a research paper. There really are a ton of ways you can use the service and that is one of the greatest things I love about it.

Final Thoughts

Once you start to play around with RebelMouse, you can definitely see that it is still in beta. Although the service does work decently well, there were times, when I would try to do certain things and it just wasn’t happening for me. But, that’s okay and that is why there is a beta stage. In the future I would love to see them add editing features for potentail blog use and possibly more templates with some design themes. I would also love to have the option to add more social networks if at all possible.
Overall, it is a cool service and one that I haven’t seen before. I definitely think this web app is heading in the right direction and they have carved themselves out a nice little niche where they are not necessarily like Facebook or Tumblr, but a combination of the two. Go and check them out here and have fun creating your own landing page.