Intellectual Property Law

Phweet

By Susan Crawford

For the last couple of months I’ve been Twittering as much as I can about whatever’s going on with OneWebDay plans.  (Hey, follow my tweets - OWD is the name.)

Now there’s Phweet, from Stuart Henshall and David Beckemeyer.  It’s making it possible to launch voice sessions with your Tweet buddies.   (For the Phweet tweets, go to their Twitter feed.)

All mellifluity aside (tweet! phweet! schreet!), this is quite interesting.  I set up a session just to see what it would be like, and it seems very easy to use.  They’re saying that it just sets up a single-session URL - you set up the connection by using the Twitter user-name of your correspondent, and you’re off.  Just like IM chat interfaces, there’s no central server being used.

If you want to, you can leave a record of the session on Twitter - and other people can join in the talk-session.  You won’t necessarily know the real identity of the person you’re talking to, just their Twitter identity.  Right now this just works with Twitter (which is certainly good for Twitter and for the people who tweet), but there’s an API for other people to do mashups.

I’m pretty fond of the text-tweet interface, quite an art-form in itself, but I can see how this light, flexible way of talking could be addictive.

Who needs a phone?

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on July 31, 2008 (boomark / email).