Social Network - HEELLO

This is one site where what strikes you first is how similar it is to Twitter. It is basically a social networking and micro blogging service. Its users get to send and receive text based posts and to share videos and pictures. Its founder is Noah Everett and it was launched on August 10th 2011. Everett is also associated with Twitpic which he founded and it is with money generated from twitpics’ advertising revenue that he set up Heello. Noah Everett claimed that the site had generated more than a million pings in 48 hours after its launch. If you have used Twitter then you will quickly understand how Heello works. For instance, Tweets are called Pings in Heello, this is when you update your status in twitter it’s a tweet in Heello it’s a ping. When you intend to forward a ping from another user to people who view your pings, it’s not a retweet like in twitter but rather it’s an echo on Heello. On twitter we have followers but on Heello they are called listeners. Then following is on twitter but its equivalent on Heello is listening. So we can say the developers did a good job of reinventing the wheel in this case. The layout is also almost identical to twitters with only a few positional differences for instance on twitter, the stream of updates are on the left hand column while on Heello they are on the right hand column. On Heello the user is known as @username and then users also @reply tom one another. On twitter updates are restrained to 140 characters and guess what, it’s exactly the same on twitter! The only dissimilarity between Heello and twitter is the different “names” given for all the twitter like actions. All that said, Heello does have an improvement on twitter in that instead of refreshing every time you want to see new tweets, on Heello you have a continuous feed of all new tweets without having to go back. The feed updates itself automatically. The other distinction one can point out is the use of thumbnails for photos and videos which are displayed within the stream. On Heello, one gets a sneak preview of the photo or video before you click on it while on twitter you have to use the hyperlink to access the multimedia files. Again, twitter lacks group messaging which is a feature on Heello. On the downside though its that there is still no mobile version yet which is kind of limiting but not to fret says Everett, they are on their way. On twitter they had been using Everett’s Twitpic for their photo service but they have since got their own service which effectively does away with Twitpic’s relevance to them. This could be the reason why Everett decided to launch his own social networking site (though a twitter rip off) as a revenge for twitter’s actions. The site has spawned a free for all grab of user names and most of the juicy names are already taken so if you encounter a household name on Heello, chances are that they are mostly fake. It’s not very flattering to have the site as a replica of another but as it goes if you like twitter you will like this one too. Heello is free to join like most other social networking sites. Just input an email address, create a username and a password and youre good to go. If you are wondering where to start from, go to Heello.com and the rest is easy, just follow the instructions.