Last August, we reported that Noah Everett, the founder of Twitter photo sharing site Twitpic, has launched a new site, called Heello. The site wasn’t open to the public yet, but a year later, it looks like the curtains have finally been drawn on Heello.
At first glance, it seems a lot like Twitter. You create a username, which is @’username’ and you can connect with Twitter and Facebook. You share what you are doing on the site with ‘Pings’ which is an 140 character update where you can attach a video, photo and/or your location.
One noticeable difference in Heello is that it offers a continuous, auto-updated stream of updates so you don’t have to press update for more ‘pings’ to come in. Media is displayed within the stream. Users can @reply you, as they would on Twitter. If you want to retweet a ping, you can ‘echo’ it. You can also send private messages both to an individual and to groups of members.
What’s odd about Heello is that it doesn’t really seem that original besides the continuous stream of updates, which actually gets annoying. And Heello certainly isn’t the first company to try to replicate Twitter (Yahoo Meme, Identica and Ekko are also playing in that space).
Last year, when we asked Everett what Heello would be focused on, he told us that it would help people communicate better, ad offer internal tools and systems to businesses, including customer support/human resource tools and a technology platform. Clearly this version of Heello is quite different from that picture.
Of course, Everett could be just going after Twitter after the company launched its own TwitPic competitor recently. It’s no secret that TwitPic was completely blindsided by Twitter’s move into its territory. Back then, Everett was visibly annoyed by Twitter’s actions. So perhaps there’s some vengeance in this launch?
And there’s nothing wrong with throwing a little competition Twitter’s way, but it’s surprising that there isn’t much creativity in Heello.
It’s also hard to imagine that TwitPic users will feel compelled to start using Heello because of the connection between Everett.
Is Heello just one big F-you to Twitter?
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