You can call someone and leave a voicemail right?

You can also send someone a text message.

So answer this question for me. Why would you want to send someone a text message linking them to a voicemail message? Also…If you got a text message linking you to a voicemail, would that annoy you? It just doesn’t seem to make any sense to me. Pinger.com is one of those "Web 2.0" services that makes me think the tech world is nuts. There are a few services that you hear about  that sound like useless ideas. Sometimes, those little ideas that seem useless at first glance, end up being very useful. Take Twitter for example. Pinger is another one. Yea at first glance it just seem like a "why would I want to do that" idea. But something about Pinger made me want to read on to see what it was all about.

Pinger.com

 What is Pinger and how does it work

OK heres the deal. You sign up for an account at Pinger.com, add your cell phone number, then put a few names in your address book. It then gives you a phone number. When you call that number, you say the name of the person you have listed in your in your contacts with Pinger.com then saw a message. The person you are messaging will then get a text message notification with a number to call. When they call the number they can hear the voice message you left.

Sounds simple but it does have some good uses. For example, lets say you are driving and cant peck out a text message. you can easily call your Pinger number and pretty much everything else is voice activated. Also, lets say you have a movie date with a group of friends and you want to call them to let them know what time the movie starts, Pinger lets you say multiple names or group names so that you can create one message that goes out to multiple people.

 These types of services are always more problematic than its worth, how’s Pinger?

Most of the time, these little ideas will pop up and it will be so much of a hassle to use that I would never use them. Pinger does a lot of things right.

  • The first thing that stood out to me was the phone number they gave me to leave messages was a local number. Many people have free long distance with their cell phone service, but not everybody. Having a local number takes the worry away for those that don’t.
  • When it came to selecting people to send the message too, I said the name, and the service just understood it. no training it ahead of time or anything like that.
  • Being able to add groups is another good feature. When explaining the significance of having groups to a friend. I used a hypothetical situation of being on a bowling team and having a bowling group. If I want to set something up with the bowling team, instead of calling everyone individually, I could just call pinger, and leave a message for the bowling group.

The service is free, and if it becomes popular, I can also see people using it the same way they use Twitter, Id like to see how the service could handle a large amount of people frequently sending group messages to each other.