Pinger.com instant voice messaging for your mobile
I got pinged this afternoon from George O’Brien regarding Pinger.
Pinger rocks!
What is Pinger? Well this text from their site explains it best:
Pinger is instant voice messaging for your mobile phone. With Pinger you send voice messages directly to someone instantly–no ringing, no greetings, no lengthy prompts. Pinger is fast and efficient like email, but with your voice. It’s mobile like text messaging, but with more personality. It’s a new communication tool for your crazy life.
I love it. I really do. I often want to send people voicemails. Sometimes I don’t want to hang around bashing out long emails and also, I really don’t want to interrupt people. I often want to get them a voicemail message, but without having to go through the rigmarole of having a conversation. When you’re busy, work coming out of your ears, to-do lists up to your arms, you don’t generally need to take a quick call from your friend.
Many of my friends are busy working during the 9-5 period. I don’t want to call and have them take my call when a) it’s extremely inconvenient to them and b) I didn’t want to interrupt them in the first place.
The current way of sending voice messages just doesn’t work properly. For some reason, voicemail seems to have this negative perspective. It’s the last thing on the block isn’t it? The last thing on the shelf when you’re trying to contact people. We need to change that, I reckon. Voice instant messages can be far more rich, expansive and exciting than a 160 character text.
Here’s how it works.
Sending on your mobile:
– dial the pinger number, say the name of the person you want to message — you’ve uploaded your contacts prior to this — say your message and then hang-up. The voice message is delivered to the recipient. Alternatively you can knock up a message to yourself — you just say ‘myself’ at the prompt. Love it.
Sending via the web:
– visit the Pinger.com website, select the recipient address, press record — it’s all done via flash, so it’s point and click — then press Send. Done!
Receiving via the web:
– this is a bit special: It’s at this point that things usually screw up with anything remotely similar to Pinger — usually such systems want you to register and login. Or, at best, they’ll play the message to you but then insist you login to send a reply. What a palava. Not so with Pinger though. They’ve really thoguht it through. Here’s the kicker – Since I’m stuck in London unable to use a North American mobile, George pinged me a voice note to my email. I clicked the link in my email and immediately I’m into the screen you see top left of this post. It’s my own ‘inbox’. No logging in. It was all dynamic in the email I received from George. The system views me as a logged in ‘guest’ – smart. So I play the message immediately. Wicked. Then, I think, ‘how do I reply, eh?’ … and then I catch sight of the flipping great ‘reply’ button. Duh 😉 So I click that. Within 2 seconds I’m recording a rambling message to George. I press the Send button. All done!
Nice!
Thoroughly recommend signing up, if only to make sure you get the ‘welcome to pinger’ voicemail sent to all new users (and guests). You can sign up for the beta here. If you’re in North America, definitely give it a go — they only need about 5 fields on the registration form — then, once you’re in, send me a voicemail to ewan@smstextnews.com.
