CHANGING HABITS
Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting review of a new service called Pinger, that I tried a few months ago. Walt describes it as:
"...a free messaging service that tries to make voice mail more usable by emphasizing its strengths and making it a little more like email, or like a cellphone text message. This new service comes from Pinger Inc, a Silicon Valley-based company started by former Palm Inc. employees.
Pinger works by sending messages using a quick back-and-forth voice-mail system. You dial a special number, say the recipient's name, leave a message and hang up. The recipient is notified of this message and its sender via Short Message Service (SMS), and/or email and then must dial in or go to a Web page to hear the voice mail. He or she can reply to the voice mail by pressing "1," leaving a message for the sender and hanging up.
You can also log into your Pinger account via the www.pinger.com Web site. Here, your Pinger voice mails are listed like emails, including the sender's name, time sent, length and notes that you can add about each message. A green arrow beside messages indicates that you replied, and messages can be sorted by category.
Pinger is one of several new services that are trying to bring voice into the Internet age. One, called Jott, at jott.com, lets you dial a number and dictate messages to yourself, like notes or reminders, or messages that can be broadcast to others. It even tries to transcribe what you say. Another, called Evoca, at evoca.com, records and stores dictation for archiving, sharing and podcasting. It offers both transcription and translation."
I particularly like Pinger's implementation of importing contacts into your Pinger database from disparate contact stores in Microsoft Outlook, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, etc.
But going to the punchline, I generally agree with Walter's conclusion on the nascent service:
"Overall, Pinger's messaging service was most convenient when I was the sender rather than the receiver. When I didn't have time to type a message on my BlackBerry or didn't want to bother with writing a text message on my phone's numeric keypad, Pinger proved to be a fast, hassle-free process that took only a few tries to get down pat. And it was helpful in situations when I wanted to leave a message rather than talk to another person.
But the process of receiving a Pinger message on a mobile device isn't as straightforward as it should be. In the time needed to receive and read the Pinger text message notification about a voice mail, some users could have already received and read a text message or BlackBerry email."
I've been an addict of voice mail services for over two decades, both in their corporate and mainstream consumer, carrier-based versions.
Particularly addictive for me has been the corporate version, where one can have a long series of back and forth voicemails between two or more parties, much like an email thread that is forwarded around back and forth between multiple participants (or a Google Gmail "conversation thread" of late).
But having a "voice mail thread" conversation has generally not been possible to do with consumer carrier-based versions, since each carrier's voice-mail system is an island unto itself, where it's difficult to forward voice mail to users on another carrier's network.
Services like Pinger offer the seductive ability to break this verticalization barrier and make voice mail horizontally democratic using the base-level SMS functionality on most of the world's cell phones.
So I buy into the core value proposition of Pinger, even though the process of using it has a relatively steep learning curve both for senders and recipients.
But it's tough to break through the initial apathy to try voice-mail in the first place.
I was reminded of this over the last few days in India, when after getting a pre-paid mobile phone for use in my travels around the country, I tried to figure out how to activate the voice-mail service.
A friend of mine who is a technology entrepreneur here then informed me that there is no voice-mail culture yet in India among the majority of the country's burgeoning millions of new cell phone users.
Instead he said, users are much more used to constantly checking their "missed calls" and "received calls" lists on their cell phones, and quickly returning the calls that they choose.
I was skeptical of this until after a couple of days, I realized that a number of folks I'd called and wasn't able to reach by leaving a voice-mail, were quickly calling me back within minutes of having missed my call. Alternatively, they'd send me a quick SMS message to let me know they were in a meeting and would call a bit later.
The lack of voice mail on my Indian cell phone has made me get in the habit of checking my missed and received call lists as well, almost with the same frequency that I check my emails on my Blackberry back home.
There's no question that voice mail both in it's basic form, and conversational thread form can be very useful to the masses, and that services like Pinger can help make them more ubiquitous. But changing user habits after they've been set can be a long and uphill battle.
This can be particularly true when most voice mail service offerings today both on land-line and mobile phones cost extra to get in the first place.
Godspeed to Pinger and it's peers.
Comments