Utterli seems like a lot like Twitter at first glance. The difference is that you can post voice messages, video, or stills directly to it from your mobile.
I don’t know about you, but I HATE texting. I think it’s stupid. It takes me forever — my fingers (small by adult standards) feel like bowling pins on the chiclet keypad of a cell phone AND the phone company charges out the yin yang for it. So when I heard about Utterli I thought I’d give it a whirl.
Weirdly enough Utterli wouldn’t let me be “tixrus” or “dorkage”, so I had to revert to my CCNA moniker marathoner.
They give you a phone number you can call, and there’s a voice menu driven interface. Haven’t tested yet whether you can shortcut it or not, anybody know? Once you get to the right place, Utterli lets you just talk into your mobile, which I think is a much more natural thing to do, ummm…. into a phone! It reminds me of an audio service where you could call on your cell phone and record something and embed it in your blogger blog. That service went belly up. Can’t remember the name of it (may have been Audioblogger) and can’t even bring it up by googling “defunct audio blogger” Maybe it was not the right time for it yet.
Utterli needs to improve their web UI a bit. It’s a bit confusing how to follow individual people, other than importing twits en masse. They give you embed code so you can embed a little player for your “utters” on your web page. And there are other widgets as well if you want them. For my money, what Utterli really needs to do is expose its API like Twitter does. One big strength of Twitter is that open API, which gives birth to all those cool (and not-so-cool) Twitter apps.
Anyway, here is my first random audio test from Utterli:
Of course the answer to the question is that they have your cell phone number on file so of course they know who you are.
I have never really been that big of a fan of texting either. Ever since I discovered you could email SMS messages to most carriers, this became my preferred method of texting. The only downside is that people end up responding to your email address, which can backfire.
Utterli sounds like a pretty cool concept. Don’t know if you could do this, but it would be neat if you could embed the Utterli player at the top of your page and have it always play your most recent sound byte. That way you could place it on your homepage or something and update it regularly, without having to change the code.
That is a cool idea Steve! It would require a plugin to do it, and it would have to access utterli through the backend and as far as I can tell they haven’t exposed an API. But they probably will, it’s getting to be the thing to do with all these social networks.
Utterli sounds like nice concept. I too hate Texting. Utterli is definitely for the person,who doesn’t have time to sit down and write out a blog. Utterli makes it simple for you and “mashes” it all together for you.
Sounds like a pretty good concept, haven’t really given it a try though. I am frequent user of twitter which has many features that can sync your cellphone and your computer and stay in touch with your friends. Some utility features in Utterli sound really good….
thats great that you are talking about the twitter api,a good example of searching with the twitter api is on twiogle.com because you can search on twitter and google at the same time.