I’m not used to read blog posts on my Nokia E61 while on the go, but yesterday there was an exception. While I was waiting for my flight I came across a post by Stuart Henshall which caught my attention more than others.
The blog post was about the ability to make an escalation from a discussion on Twitter to a real call. I read it and thought of what we did on my company’s video microblogging Hictu. On Hictu you can easily call your friends through Skype, Gizmo, Abbeyphone but, above all, through Jajah , whose button is integrated in every user profile and lets you make an excalation from a microblogging conversation to a regular phone call (an example below).
Anyway, Stuart was thinking of something different, much more integrated with twitter. When back at home yesterday evening, here is the response: Phweet . Stuart and David Beckemeyer, the PhoneGnome man, are the persons behind this interesting mashup between voice and Twitter.
The usage is very easy: you just have to insert your Twitter data on Phweet then insert the nickname of the person you want to call to (let’s say @john). An unique url is created for the call and a message is sent (through your Twitter account) to @john with the link to join the call. Here is what this looks like when I invited my friend @Muzedon:
That link points to:
You can choose your preferred method to be called: on the browser with a SIP URI or through other services like Gizmo, PhoneGnome or Free World Dialup.
All the methods above are free of course, but calling to a regular phone is not available yet. It’s clear that it’s not going to be free, but maybe it will be the most usable and quick way to get connected.
The service is in public alpha for testing purposes. I highly recommend to check it out since I believe it’s going to become more and more interesting and feature-rich as they are closer to an official public launch, due in 100 days now.
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