I got pinged this afternoon from George O’Brien regarding Pinger.
Pinger rocks!
What is Pinger? Well this text from their site explains it best:
Pinger is instant voice messaging for your mobile phone. With Pinger you send voice messages directly to someone instantly–no ringing, no greetings, no lengthy prompts. Pinger is fast and efficient like email, but with your voice. It’s mobile like text messaging, but with more personality. It’s a new communication tool for your crazy life.
I love it. I really do. I often want to send people voicemails. Sometimes I don’t want to hang around bashing out long emails and also, I really don’t want to interrupt people. I often want to get them a voicemail message, but without having to go through the rigmarole of having a conversation. When you’re busy, work coming out of your ears, to-do lists up to your arms, you don’t generally need to take a quick call from your friend.
Many of my friends are busy working during the 9-5 period. I don’t want to call and have them take my call when a) it’s extremely inconvenient to them and b) I didn’t want to interrupt them in the first place.
The current way of sending voice messages just doesn’t work properly. For some reason, voicemail seems to have this negative perspective. It’s the last thing on the block isn’t it? The last thing on the shelf when you’re trying to contact people. We need to change that, I reckon. Voice instant messages can be far more rich, expansive and exciting than a 160 character text.
Here’s how it works.
Sending on your mobile:
– dial the pinger number, say the name of the person you want to message — you’ve uploaded your contacts prior to this — say your message and then hang-up. The voice message is delivered to the recipient. Alternatively you can knock up a message to yourself — you just say ‘myself’ at the prompt. Love it.
Sending via the web:
– visit the Pinger.com website, select the recipient address, press record — it’s all done via flash, so it’s point and click — then press Send. Done!
Receiving via the web:
– this is a bit special: It’s at this point that things usually screw up with anything remotely similar to Pinger — usually such systems want you to register and login. Or, at best, they’ll play the message to you but then insist you login to send a reply. What a palava. Not so with Pinger though. They’ve really thoguht it through. Here’s the kicker – Since I’m stuck in London unable to use a North American mobile, George pinged me a voice note to my email. I clicked the link in my email and immediately I’m into the screen you see top left of this post. It’s my own ‘inbox’. No logging in. It was all dynamic in the email I received from George. The system views me as a logged in ‘guest’ – smart. So I play the message immediately. Wicked. Then, I think, ‘how do I reply, eh?’ … and then I catch sight of the flipping great ‘reply’ button. Duh 😉 So I click that. Within 2 seconds I’m recording a rambling message to George. I press the Send button. All done!
Nice!
Thoroughly recommend signing up, if only to make sure you get the ‘welcome to pinger’ voicemail sent to all new users (and guests). You can sign up for the beta here. If you’re in North America, definitely give it a go — they only need about 5 fields on the registration form — then, once you’re in, send me a voicemail to ewan@smstextnews.com.
Doesnt voice mms work the same way? I can record a voice message and mms it to a friend now. Yes theres no web interface but is there something else Im missing.
Good point Rich. Only time I can see that it has more than MMS is if youre abroad and dont want to pay roaming charges, or flat battery I guess.
does gotvoice.com offer the same service? I know it will retrieve voicemail’s and send them to my e-mail which is way cool, but will it do the reverse like pinger will?
Do you know the companies PINGER and SNAPVINE?
Pinger and Snapvine are highly INSECURE!!!!
What this means: I can break into your Pinger and Snapvine phone accounts. I can listen to your messages. I can send out messages as you.
How do I do this? Easy. I mask / spoof CALLER ID / ANI. Anyone can do this, amateur hacks, etc.
Well, there are others, but suffice to say that these companies are doing new things with social networking sites and phones that help to connect people.
The problem is that these companies have a scalability problem based on inbound calling.
You see, if you have hundreds of thousands or millions of users, you can’t give everyone a unique dial in phone number.
SECURITY PROBLEM
What these companies have done is based user identification on Caller ID / ANI – meaning that you call their service, and their systems recognize your phone via Caller ID.
The problem is that Caller ID is highly insecure and can be faked.
The problem that these “dial in†companies are trying to solve is one of scalability. They simply cannot have enough dial in numbers for each user.
Therefore, they have architected a way to recognize each caller by Caller ID and to base the entire user authentication system on this insecure method.
This can easily be hacked.
SOLUTION
The solution is funny – both Pinger and SnapVine make you enter in a PIN CODE when you dial in without validating your phone.
After you validate your phone, you no longer need to enter the PIN CODE.
So in effect, when you validate your phone, you make your account INSECURE.
What Pinger and SnapVine need to do is always require the PIN CODE.