Phweet: URL-based telephony for Twitter
by Imran Ali
A few months ago we speculated on the future of voice-based applications driven from the Twitter platform, notably the potential of Twitterfone as a kind of ‘verbal command line’.
Recent weeks have seen the launch of another voice-based service built upon Twitter - Phweet - enabling Twitter users to use their status messages to invoke a conference call.
Users simply sign in using their Twitter credentials, choose a friend they want to call and the service generates a unique ‘Phweet’, a short URL that can sent that Twitter user, that when clicked will initite a call between you and that user.
Phweets are a remarkable development, essentially lashing together rich status, availability and presence messages with the ability to click-to-call - pretty much presence-bsaed telephony.
Currently the service can create utilise PSTN numbers or browser sessions to connect users - providing pretty wide coverage and availability for Twitter users.
It’ll be interesting to see where Phweet takes the technology and if they can harness other, broader and more popular social networks such as Facebook and indeed how Twitter begins to define its relationships with such third parties.
