eChirpy: an alternative for Twitter and Facebook ?
It stroke me as a good idea to recognize the predominance of microblogging's 140 characters in the world of communication and having the courage to be just a bit different at the same time.
I've now just read to first general mail posting. Quite ingeniously constructed idea to add functionality everyone could need as a sort of niche: alot of them cannot in the usual channels because the pointy haired boss is looking over their shoulder or their 'puter security boots them off FB or twitter... and forget being able to use your cell phone at work...
but I have to remarks:
1 I thought this niche was already taken by posterious.com, enabling mailing posts is apparently not patented ?
2 this post (originally ended by the three points after work) was already to long for the site (maximum of 500 characters)
I'm doubting a bit that the character limit is well choosen and the mailing functionality is quite nice but my mails are usually a little bit longer than 140 characters
once I'm over 300 characters I've now idea when I stop writing, ideas come at the moment as if I'm 'in flow' with inspiration
300 characters is the limit of babl.nl if I'm not mistaken ( http://jansegers.babl.nl )
Once beyond that number of characters, I usually post on posterious by mail or on kwippy : a micro/macroblog post are shortened as entries of 300 characters to an article that can take any length - at least, I didn't reach any upperlimit as yet ( http://kwippy.com )
I'm sure eChirpy is a nice product, but I'm not sure its UI or its features are going to assure its future for a very long time; yet with some tweeking they can make it
their product/site name is fantastic by any standards, their slogan is too and the enthusiasm of the team behind it works inspirational - and that's precisely the problem I have with their 500 characters limit.
Pieter Jansegers
Webosoof and TwitterConsultant
