Microblogging options abound, most with drippy sounding names and many with half-baked functionality, having only been thrown together because Twitter was down again due to some kind of malfunction with the staffroom espresso machine. Rejaw, on the other hand, offers users a solid alternative with a number of excellent features. Without whales.

The basic idea's pretty much the same: shout and post something on your main profile page, whisper to send a private message to someone. nothing really special here yet, but bear with me.

Shouts, whispers, and replies are posted to the Rejaw servers almost instantly, so what you actually get is a more like an IRC/microblogging mashup than just another Twitter wannabe. The interface is nicely Ajaxed, and extremely responsive. Keep an eye on the status overlay at the bottom of your browser window, it'll let you know when new shouts and whispers are posted.Everything you shout on Rejaw is given a permalink, which allows you to involve your friends in the conversation even if they don't want to sign up. That's right, guest posting is allowed. Privacy lovers rejoice!

Where Rejaw truly shines, though is with its automatic embedding functions. Paste the URL from a YouTube clip in a message, and the embed coode is handled for you. Image URLs also work, as do MP3s. The team is hard at work integrating other embeds, most notably Vimeo, so even more functionality is on the horizon. It's a nice touch, and makes pages much nicer to look at (and more useful) than Twitter's "steaming pile of text" format.

Add API access for developers and the well-built Radar desktop application (watch for my follow-up post), and Rejaw is about as fully featured as microblogging/communication apps get. Rejaw delivers the kind of experience I hoped Twitter would.