FlameUp: Complain, Rant, and Voice Your Opinion

What do you do when you're pissed off? Just about everyone at somepoint or another has complained about something. I think people by nature love to complain and to talk when given the chance, whether its explicit or not, or to a willing or unwilling ear. For the most part, rants are great ways to blow off steam, and sometimes its hard to control that urge to tell your boss, professor, friend, or random irritating passerby how you really feel. Thankfully, the Internet brought about true anonymity. With the advent of blogs and websites, people can rant to a seemingly infinite audience with few or no repercussions. For instance, popular YouTuber Phillip Defranco is a great example of how someone used the internet to unleash frustrations. YouTube is one medium, and now you have another - FlameUp.com, started by John Xie from Babson, provides you with an anonymous arena to run your mouth dirty. As their motto goes, "Have an Attitude."

FlameUp is put simply a place for ranters to congregrate, rant, and hang out. The homepage instantly communicates exactly what FU (clever, isn't it?) is; on the left of the home page you will see some top rants with a myriad of interesting titles “WOMEN!!! WTF!!”, “Gay Marriage Lost”, and “Taliban calling Barack Obama...”, while on the right you will see a form to submit a Quick Rant. To be a part of FU anyone can simply write a short Quick Rant or go up to the upper right and click on “Rant”. From there you can an add a title, the rant itself in the body, with an option of writing in a name and a website, article, or other, tags, categories, and the choice to keep the rant public or private. All of this is actually quite sparse input. Once the rant is up people can comment on it and discuss the rant. The ability to create a profile doesn't defeat the purpose of the anonymity since there is no need to actually register personal information and has a simpler process than actually creating a post. Anonymity is something that FlameUp understands and respects.

“Rants” are often on personal topics, relationships, conflicting views, or frustrations pertaining to current events. It's amazing how some posts cause long conversations and threads to start. One post, written by a girl about her ex-bf and how he won't quite World of Warcraft, garnered over 380 comments! It doesn't matter what it's about, people simply like to voice their opinion.  This innate desire to communicate is at the heart of FlameUp, which they expressly state on their blog: “Our vision is to create a space where everyone can share and discuss their thoughts openly and at the same time let some steam out and relax after ranting/commenting/flaming others on the website.” The name of the website, both in its full and abbreviated form, gets that well across.

For the most part, it seems that there is great potential for FlameUp, partly because it could become a pretty addicting site. Not only does FU replace other rant-like websites with superior features and simplicity, but they could revolutionize how the Internet rant is perceived. Since FU is still working on design, programming, and features, they have a while to go before they settle on a good design. For instance, one thing that might be obvious to those visiting the site is the similarity that it has to Digg ('Burn It' is just like 'Digg It'). They admit to this on their blog and desire to get beyond the Digg look. Nonetheless, there are many ways for FU to become even more different than the rest: create a rant widget, partner with bigger websites that have comment sections, compete against unexpected markets (like the blog market), and create more sophisticated features that are simple to use. Even though FlameUp.com is new to the scene, they show that they understand their market well and they have designed a distinct style. What are you pissed off about?