Heello: The Twitter Clone
Twitpic developer Noah Everett recently released his ‘Heello’ service, and it’s generated a lot of talk since. Why is this newsworthy? Despite first mentioning the service last August, the service was released one day after Twitter implemented photo insertion, which was the foundation of Everett’s Twitpic service. The funny thing is, the service is laughably similar to Twitter, to the point that various sources covering the story don’t know if it’s serious. Heello is very much a slightly tweaked version of Twitter. Tweets are called ‘pings’ and are limited to 140 characters; retweets are called ‘echoes’ and followers have become ‘listeners’. The only notable differences are visible content insertion, an ongoing real-time feed, and a stream of activity from across the service as a whole. Hello also allows Facebook and Twitter integration so that users may post their updates across different social media, a feature like that offered by Tweetdeck and other social media management tools. So is this a genuine stab at a new social media platform? Or is it an elaborate publicity stunt with its roots in a plan to make Twitter more usable? Maybe both; we will have to wait and see. Either way, within two days of launch, it seems to have garnered a significant fake ‘celebrity’ user base, if little else. Still, I wouldn't encourage Internet marketers to work it into their SMO strategies just yet.