TwitPic Founder Says heello to Twitter
posted Thursday Aug 11, 2011 by Jon Wurm
Noah Everett, the man responsible for TwitPic, has gone from 3rd party Twitter integrations to straight up creating his own Twitter service that has already managed to hit 1 million "pings" in 2 days. It is very likely that Everett feels revenge is not for the birds after Twitter decided to clip its wings and revoked tons of API tokens and apps in an effort to create a more consistent Twitter experience. You may have also noticed the pictures attached to people's tweets which is something Twitter does in-house now and could very well be the reason for heello (he low).
When you create an account for the first time, you might think you accidentally signed into your Twitter account; alas this is not the case. One obvious difference is that your profile page layout is flipped, your "ping" feed is on the right and only information pertaining to you is displayed on the left. It is also worth noting that the ping feed happens in real time. There is no "Similar to..." or "Following" preview. All that information on heello is available though the clearly marked links underneath your profile pic. The terminology is different and more sensible in my opinion, tweets are "pings" and retweets are "echos" which evidences his developer or Navy background. Follow is called "Listen," making the people you are subscribed to people you are "listening" to and people who listen to you are "Listeners."
To see what I'm talking about first hand, check out the pictures after the break.
heello wouldn't be a service developed by the man who started TwitPic if you couldn't attach images to your pings and it's reassuring to see that. Everett took things a step further by including video attachments as well, something that Twitter has openly said it will avoid at all costs. They also have Facebook and of course, Twitter, connectivity currently available, we would have expected nothing less.
After fiddling around with heello a little bit, it also seems to me that the interface and interactions are a little more simple than Twitter's service. That could certainly change at any time, yet I find it amusing since Twitter was afraid of 3rd party apps creating a better Twitter experience than Twitter. Their fear now should be that they have no control over them anymore and if they thought the 3rd party services were a threat before... things are probably just getting started with respects to that.