Hello Heello!

[frame align=”left”][/frame]No, it’s not a typo. I really am saying hello to a ‘brand-new’ social network launched today called Heello (pronounced he-low), created by Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic. Interestingly enough the launch of Heello came the day after Twitter launched it’s own photo-sharing service as a direct competitor to TwitPic – which ofcourse brings up the question if Heello is just Noah’s way of getting back at Twitter. As of right now Heello is a direct replica of Twitter with the sole difference really being the lingo. Instead of tweeting, users send “pings” to their followers. Instead of retweeting, users “echo” other posts. And instead of following, friends “listen” to their friends. The only real new feature of Heello is that updates appear in a user’s stream in real-time, which can get quiet annoying if you are trying to maintain a conversation with someone and suddenly their ping has been pushed down and out of view by 15 new non-english Pings.

Everett told VentureBeat that Heello will soon support video, checkins, SMS integration, mobile apps and a “Channels” feature that works much like Twitter Lists – but as it stands right now – it’s simply a Twitter clone. Regardless I have signed up to see what the future will bring for Heello. To see the service in action for yourself, check out the live stream of public activity; or sign-up for an account yourself!