Heello

» see heello.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

by the time i would have signed up to heello, twitter was already the main app on my phone and twitpic was where everyone i followed posted photos. heello arrived on august 10 2011 from noah everett, the founder of twitpic, with a clean copy of the twitter ui and a pitch that mostly amounted to "twitter but not twitter." it was a strange day to pick. twitter had announced its own native photo upload twenty-four hours earlier, and heello's reason for existing got cut in half before it had any users.

the basic loop was the same as twitter. you posted short text and followed people. heello called posts "pings" instead of "tweets" and shipped private messaging from day one. the day-one push was strong enough that the service hit 4 pings per second and crossed a million pings within 48 hours. by january 2013 the team relaunched as a check-in plus social network hybrid with a place database of around 58 million points of interest.

heello had already passed the moment where most of the journalists who covered twitter alternatives had moved on to app.net, which had a manifesto and a $50 a year price and slightly more interesting product opinions. the relaunched check-in version of heello arrived after foursquare had already collapsed the public check-in habit into a swarm-style background mode. the audience the new version needed had stopped showing up to that genre entirely.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

heello was the twitpic founder's hedge. twitpic existed entirely on top of twitter's api and could be cut off at any time, which was the worry pattern of every third-party twitter shop in 2011. heello let the team own a small social network if the api relationship deteriorated. it did not turn into the lifeboat anyone hoped for. twitpic itself died in 2014 after a trademark dispute with twitter, six weeks before heello also went dark.

~ the postmortem ~

the june 23 2014 announcement said the service would shut down the next day. the company kept the front page up for another two months with a thank-you note. by august 15 2014 even the static page was gone. there was no acquirer and no acqui-hire. there was no migration tool either. the user base, whatever was left of the original million, was just told to use twitter.

~ the legacy ~

heello sits in the long catalog of clean-ui twitter clones from the 2010-2013 window. identi.ca had the same idea earlier and app.net had a more elaborate version later. the lesson the catalog teaches is the same lesson it kept teaching, which is that a microblog without a network is just a text editor. heello had a million accounts at one point. it did not have a million conversations.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »