On Wednesday, a day after Twitter rolled out its photo-sharing service which poses direct competition to TwitPic, TwitPic founder Noah Everett announced the launch of Heello, a startup he has been working on for a year, reported Venture Beat.
Heello, is Everett’s own micro-blogging site which mimics Twitter in many respects, albeit with different nomenclatures. Instead of ‘tweeting’, users send ‘pings’ to their followers. Not to mention Pings are limited to 140 characters. Users ‘echo’ rather than ‘retweet’ and ‘listen’ to friends instead of ‘follow’ them. The only real difference between Twitter and Heello is that in the newcomer, the updates appear in a user’s stream in real-time, which is annoying if they want to click on something in a friend’s tweet.
Originally, Heello began as a completely different product that revolved around “email and making it suck less,” said Everett. “But not too long ago, we decided… social is fun, and we have experience at it.”
Everett and team are soon planning to launch video support, checkins, SMS integration, mobile applications, and something new that doesn’t relate to any of Twitter’s features – Channels, that will act in a way similar to Google+ Circles.
“Channels will let users be grouped together, and users can then ‘listen’ to a channel to see all their pings,” said Everett. For example, you could set up a channel for dog lovers, people in a particular neighborhood, etc.
Everett said that his team was trying to evolve on microblogging and fill in the gaps for users. “People love to share what they are doing with photos and videos, we want to make that experience seamless and easy,” he said.
Denying that the launch date had anything to do with Twitter’s release of its own official photo-sharing app, Everett said that it was ironic serendipity than a planned attack on Twitter. “It is a coincidence, but I am glad it happened that way. If Twitter can compete with its developers without fair notice, then why can’t we?” he said.
Though Twitter’s launch of its own photo-sharing app will spell danger for other photo-sharing services that uses Twitter’s API, Everett noted that TwitPic will not be fading into obscurity any time soon. “TwitPic will continue to live on, we have got a huge base of loyal users and we still want to continue providing them with best services possible,” he said.
TwitPic is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to Twitter and is often used by citizen journalists to upload and distribute pictures in near real-time as an event is unfolding. TwitPic was launched by Noah Everett in 2008.
If Everett’s new venture Heello is to compete and succeed against the 200 million user strong Twitter then it has to come up with some truly innovative features of its own. Yet, Everett seems confident. “I think anyone has a fair shot at competing with anyone,” he said.