High profile Tory MP for Corby Louise Mensch is in the headlines today but this time not for her politics.The prolific tweeter has caused a stir with the announcement that she’s launching her own social network Menshn.com (a play on ‘mention’ and not her name, apparently) which aims to put the debate back into Social Media. But, is it any different from Twitter?

Frustrated with the inane tweets of some (citing the ‘people tweeting what they had for breakfast’ line) Mensch wants to put topic back at the heart online conversation. The service is launching to coincide with the American election, a time of highly increased social conversation.

Image courtesy of Techcrunch

Mensch has launched the social network in partnership with Luke Bozier, a former Labour political adviser, who said of the launch:

"We were both frustrated at the way Twitter doesn't focus on topics. We both love Twitter, but if you want to focus on the election there's no obvious place to do that online. Twitter is just too random. We wanted to encourage people to have conversations rather than broadcast their thoughts." (credit: The Guardian)

Sounds a lot like Twitter’s recent addition of event pages but, they’re very much in their infancy and seem more like a way of pleasing brands than users. Whilst we love Twitter here at Stickyeyes we’d all admit that, at times, there can be too much noise if you’re trying to follow a specific event and, you often see tweeters go out of their way to be controversial or scathing, just to get RTed.

Which is why we like the idea of Menshn, it seems like a grown up social network that will generate great conversation around big topics.

But, we have to remember that back in the London riots of last year Louise Mensch was heavily criticised for calling for social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook to be shut down as she believed blackouts would stop rumours about trouble spreading online, which cause fear among residents and trigger unnecessary calls to police.

Menshn is currently only available in the United States but has plans to expand into other territories, including the UK, soon. If you’re desperate to start menshning you can enter your email address over on the site and be the first to know when it’s launched.

Will you be signing up?