HulloMail is good, but is it a short-term answer to Google Voice?

Yesterday I stumbled across HulloMail for the first time. (To reference all my sources correctly, it was through an article in The Register that had been posted on Twitter by @allaboutiphone). In short, HulloMail is a service that diverts your voicemail away from the default offering provided by your mobile phone provider to HulloMail. The primary advantage of such a service is that is offers the next generation of voicemail; something only O2 in the UK through the iPhone can even attempt to match through their Visual Voicemail. Essentially visual voicemail works like email in that it gives you a view of who has left a message and the date/time so you can choose what messages you listen to.

Not subscribing to the O2 pay-monthly iPhone tariff visual voicemail is one of the few features of the iPhone that isn't available to me. HulloMail offers a free workaround of this service, and in my opinion it is already better than the iPhone's offering. Firstly, HulloMail uses Gmail technology to store your voicemail messages as mp3's and then emails them directly to your Inbox. You can access your voicemail from any internet enabled location, even when you don't have your mobile to hand. It also offers a customisable text messaging service which is similar to O2's, in that when you have a new voicemail, it send you an SMS and you can call the phone number (local 01 number too!) and listen to your message. It will also tell you if someone called but didn't leave a message. This doesn't interfere with the missed call function on your iPhone, so a full audit of sent/received calls is still available.

An impressive additional feature is that you can sync your contacts with Google and other providers, so instead of a list of numbers you can see names of people who've left you a message. This sounds straight forward when you consider listening to messages from your phone, but it takes on a different and more impressive function when you're checking your messages through your email! In Gmail, HulloMail will also create and label and label all messages as well; keeping things neat and tidy!

The upshot of this new approach is that your voicemail is now more accessible, with greater control over how you listen to your messages and has the added, and

probably key, benefit of being stored forever and simply to retrieve! It's a bold and innovative move from HulloMail and one that I'm sure will catch on to other, bigger players in the market place before too long. Which brings me to my second point...

Like most people who consider themselves to be cool, but in fact others would probably judge as Geeky or techy, I sign up to a lot of innovative service in the beta stage. (I'm currently waiting either to be invited by Google directly to test Google Wave, or for my invite from a very kind @artinliverpool for the invite they sent me to come through!) One service I was looking forward to getting a sneak preview of was Google Voice. Unfortunately when it did come through I was left disappointed as it's currently only available in beta in the US. (I might change my language settings to US, see if that works!)

From the preview information and marketing copy I can find of Google Voice, it's very similar to HulloMail. However and unfortunately for HulloMail, the list of additional features is also very impressive! In addition to shared features of being able to listen to voicemail on the web and receive notifications via email and SMS, Google offers voicemail transcripts to SMS and email as well as a host of calling features, conference calls, call screening and just about everything else you could wish for! The demo really does look exciting (if you like that sort of thing).

I've always been something of a loyal customer when it comes to technology: not afraid to change, but willing to stick with what I've found good service in the past. In theory that should persuade me to stick with HulloMail over Google Voice, but I suspect I won't. As I've posted about previously, I'm a big Google fan. Not only do I like their approach and the applications and services they produce, but increasingly it is becoming easier to adopt Google's version of the latest technology because I'm using so many other Google applications already! (one notable exception is the Andriod phone, but I'm not ruling it out). People may cite Microsoft as a dangerous precedent, but I believe that Google leant many lessons from how Microsoft developed during the 90's and have built a strategy that tries to ensure they won't repeat their mistakes. Their pricing and commercial model, for example, is so different, they shouldn't be labelled as Monopolists (is that a correct noun?) quite as readily as Microsoft were.

However, no amount of Google praising and reassurances that they will be a 'different' will be of much comfort for the likes of HulloMail. A great, innovative product built by small team of both technical and entrepreneurial minds, but still under a very real threat of trailing in the dirt of the new corporate machine.

Who tweets the Twitter demise?

I was about to post something else and wanted to check a quick reference on Twitter. However, it's down! As Twitter has broken some of the biggest stories of the past 12 months and thus gained a reputation for breaking news quicker than anyone else, who breaks this one? status.twitter.com is presumably located on a separate platform but how many people know it's there?

Who tweets the twitter demise, that's what I want to know!

Nimbuzz leads the way in Aggregated Social Networking / Chat

It's so simple it's almost genius! The RSS reader of the chat-based world. 10 years ago if you wanted to read an article on a website, you more than likely typed the URL into Internet Explorer and off you went. Today, my Google Reader handles hundreds of feeds from all types of internet sites, organises them and displays them in an easy to read, share and digestible way. So the chat world is following in its footsteps.

For someone who has previously boasted to not really 'do' internet chats, I have an account to do the very same thing with Skype, Google Talk, MSN (or whatever they are called now) and even Facebook has an offering! I use Skype the most although to a limited amount of people, and then Google Talk and occasionally Facebook. Not a heavy user but enough to keep on top of!

A while ago I became aware of a service called Beejive. It basically aggregates your chat logins into a single application, loads your contacts (I can't quite bring myself to say 'buddies') into a screen and you chat to them over the relevant networks, but from the same, single interface. Almost revolutionary! Although it did cost. Not being an excessive user I decided against it.

Now though I have found Nimbuzz and in the short space of time I've been using it, also seen ebuddy which is the same thing. Nimbuzz has one edge over Beejive: it's free on the iPhone! This morning it updated to include push notifications (although not for Skype yet, which is a shame).

This new approach and functionality helps me so I'm sure it will other people! It also seems to be a continuation of transparency being the new driver in innovation. Twitter I believe is the first hugely successful service to let almost anyone and everyone have access to their data. Their own website isn't the number one interface to twitter! Yet this has almost made it successful. The brand and the infrastructure are the value in twitter, how people get there is not. The same can be said for a lot of the chat programs. Skype make their money through calls (which you can do using Nimbuzz too). Therefore it does make sense to make the process of calling as accessible as possible. I haven't used all of Nimbuzz's offerings yet as I've concentrated on the iPhone app but I struggle to see where they make their money from? Maybe they take a cut of skype and other programs calls? I did notice that Skype seem to have a financial interest in Nimbuzz.

Whatever the intracies of the financial model of this new approach, I do believe as a strategy it is probably the right one to follow and will lead the way in the future: organisations opening themselves up to increase their exposure and therefore revenue whilst at the same time making their service more accessible for their users is a pretty good idea to me!

A Twitter Experience...

About 6 months ago Twitter.com became huge. Almost overnight. It got an incredible amount of press and everyone wanted part of it. I'm not a natural bandwagon jumper for social networking progressions so it was only after the Mumbai terror attacks and Hudson River plane crash and the role Twitter played in breaking those stories on a world stage I started to take notice. Even then it was more to register my username before someone else did! (that's twitter.com/benchadwick in case you were wondering).

I decided not to post any of my experiences on Twitter until I'd passed through a couple of stages: these were notablly signing up and getting started, understanding how it worked, getting the most (for me) out of it and finally progressing past the novetly factor. Hopefully by waiting I can give a better account and comment on how I found the process.

I began, as I suspect most people do, with the following:

benchadwick: Don't really have anything to say! 2009-01-16 15:49:29 

source: http://myfirsttweet.com

Impressively as I manually search back through some of my early tweets, I seem to have avoided the cliched 'Don't really understand twitter', 'how does this work' and 'this is my first tweet' postings! This can possibly be attributed to the fact that I knew a bit about twitter before signing up or more probably sheer luck!

Lots and lots and lots of people have written on the different stages people go through when using twitter, so I won't! For the record these are good examples: Rohit Bhargava's 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance (pictured), Jason Hiner's 4 Stages for ZDNet and this by Jemima Kiss (of the Guardian fame). 

So I'd signed up to secure my username, done the usual search of people already on there and started to follow them, all with quite an open mind. Using the search function it started to become easy to see how the plane crash and terror attacks could spread. Almost everything tweeted on Twitter is searchable in seconds. There are also ways of following tags (popular subjects such as #hudson or #uksnow to group information together). I also noticed how easy it was to follow other people. In the main you don't even need to ask them first! What slowely became obvious is that Twitter could be a great source of information, depending on the people you follow, but as such following these people on the web can be a bit constrictive.

Not wanting to name drop but I read a tweet by Krishnan Guru-Murthy (twitter.com/krishgm) who said that about 800 was the right amount to follow. I struggle with 60!! In fairness there are third party applications you can use such as tweetdeck to do this, but I've never bothered. Using the web is more restrictive but it also helps you decide who to follow and who not. 100 posts in 10 minutes by one person can be annoying, especially if they are a news outlet. It can be too much to take in, so I found I tend to folllow people who tweet little and often!

So I'd started getting into the swing of things, following a mixture of the rich, famous, news outlets, journalists and friends. I found it easy to follow themes and conversations as they developed as well as taking part myself (note once had an exchange with the mighty @krishgm! I found head to head against Facebook I'd started to prefer it as new information was in far greater supply. However after a while I found that the novetly was wearing off and that unless I had something I thought people might like to hear, I wouldn't say anything. Too often all I could muster was a comment on the salt outside of my office window! 

Maybe it's just the changing of the seasons: holiday mode is kicking in and people spend less time in front of their twitter pages? More likely I believe both myself and twitter are evolving in our uses. Even during my few months with Twitter I've noticed the commercial world stand up and take notice. Some I like, others less so. The main attraction for me is the access to the usually inaccessible. What @simonmayo, @richardpbacon and other public figures think. How journalists such as @jemimakiss and @davidbartlett1 prepare, research, deliver and comment on stories and in the inside track of what is happening on @bbc5live or @channel4news. [incidentally that's how you send people a message, eg. '@benchadwick' in Twitter. I've found people now refer to other people on Twitter with the @ prefix. Presumably because it links to their profile, but I find it amusing!]

There's a whole other side to Twitter that I am yet to embrace, and that I probably won't ever bother to. Ironically this is one of it's main USP's! Because what we say, who we say it to and are basics stats are all easily searchable, Twitter is a goldmine of information to sift, pick out and target for whatever related aspect you are peddling. I found that out the other day. I'd used a service called Nozbe.com and tweeted my experience. The next day a professor from America had sent me a message regarding it! For me what was a little too small a world! For her it opened up a whole new medium for research. 

To conclude my experience with Twitter over the past few months; I've enjoyed it, will probably use it for the foreseeable future but maybe less frequently than in the beginning. I don't have the personality to drive my usage as far as it can go: making friends, contacts, networks online is not something that interests me. I also don't have a professional interest strong enough to follow through. I can't use social networking to enhance my professional career at this point in time. These are the main drivers behind my twitter use falling into line with the likes of Facebook on the social networking front, and the internet sites I visit as a daily ritual! (the beeb, guardian, google reader being the top set) 

  

Out with the old, in with the new!

My debut (new) blog, outlining my (also) new website with screen shots from old site and a brief explanation of the differences between the two.

Main differences are:

• CMS-driven using Joomla! (not quite ready)
• New Blog..technology, music and no doubt sport reviews 
• My Twitter feed (@benchadwick)
• ShareThis feed

The main objective for the new site is to update my experience for creating websites and web content. The old site was very much an exercise in learning HTML and as such was developed in notepad using a basic HTML editor. The result was a much improved knowledge of HTML but a dated and frame-based site that looks like and 11-year old created it! [That's probably insulting to 11-year olds, I take it back!]

     

Not exactly a work of art, but a good learning experience. My old site introduced me to the concept of inserting features from other websites into mine. I played around with Google's Picassa, You Tube and an RSS tool to create richer content than what I could have achieved on my own. 

I also wanted to have keep my bookmarks online, so I could access them from any PC. However my database skills weren't up to the task and I ended up not being able to add bookmarks effectively. I've since discovered Delicious which does this for me now!  

I'll continue to update content and add more features to the new site using the old-fashioned bit-by-bit approach!!!