Pinger is the first service I'll examine in a small set of startups and established companies aspiring to bring swarming or flocking to mobile communication. (Next post, I'll look at Jyngle.)
CELL 2 CELL BASE CASE

Pinger's operations can be a bit difficult to describe, so I'll start with the steady state case where all participants are set up and mobile. Let's be clear that Pinger's quanta of communication is the voice message and voice is the UI. The mobile user never types a message. SMS is only received as system generated alerts.

The initiating user dials a designated special local number and specifies, with voice prompt guidance, the distribution list and records the message. The voice recognition works very well for my test examples. Contacts are managed through the web interface. The recipients each receive an SMS alert on their phones which specify a number to call for message retrieval. (Pressing TALK on my phone dials the number in the SMS automatically.) Pinger uses caller ID to identify the account so no password entry is necessary. (Those afraid of caller ID spoofing or who have blocked ID can enable password protection.)
Recipients hear the message, can then record their own voice reply and direct that much the same way an email can be directed, back to the original sender only, all recipients or forwarded to other recipients. Like the carbon copy (cc: ) trail in an email conversation, Pinger plays back the whole stack of voice messages in the thread last in, first out (LIFO). Pressing 1 kills the playback and shifts to reply mode immediately.

The distribution list can be comprised of individual contacts or groups of contacts established through the web interface. For example, I can specify "Jane Doe" and "Crocheting Club." Pinger seems smart enough not to send the same message to Jane Doe twice if she happens to be a contact in the "Crocheting Club."

MIXED MODE - WEB & MOBILE

In the case that your recipients are not all fully set up, ie they are not registered Pinger users, they will receive via email a link to a partially functional web guest account that allows them to hear messages at their computer through an embedded player.

A registered user can use the web interface to manage contacts and send voice messages through a webmail-like console. Messages are recorded through a flash applet. Yes, the developers have seeded the interface with AJAXy goodness. The player has sporadic problems with Firefox 1.5.0.7 but works fine on IE6/Maxthon.

ONE WAY TO MYSPACE

Once a registered user has imported her MySpace friends list, she can send voice comments to designated friend profiles and post voice bulletins to everybody. The postings will embed an audio player with voice file.

This feature seems to be outside the main mission of cell2cell messaging, but it does leverage the platform naturally, and MySpace virulence could be the chasm crossing point for Pinger.

CC: versus BCC:

The biggest privacy flaw I see is the cc: mode of the messages: every recipient of the message has access to the whole recipient list. On the phone, if they request, they can hear every recipient and through the web interface they can see additionally see the email addresses of each recipient. (The same flaw exists in Sprint's Picture Mail service. Try sending the same picture to multiple girlfriends at once and cope with the disaster you get when they learn each others' phone numbers!)

In my town, SMS crossed the chasm through the niche of VIP party goers. These are highly social people who guard and parcel out information carefully. They may not be the type of friends you want to have but they are the types of users you need for a fledgling social communication service. SMS clients have always done bcc: at best. You get but you don't see who else got. This is not a flaw with Pinger per se but a flaw in the social communication design pattern they've implemented. The openness of cc: may limit Pinger's mobile usefulness to tight groups like families or teams or teenage urban posses.

CONCLUSION

If you enjoy carrier push to talk services or your team has a regular need for coordination, you could benefit from the Pinger's messaging distribution and reply features.

With Pinger's power in messaging many recipients, it's easy to overlook the conveniences of voice--and the voice UI--for communicating with only one or two. People who hate using their hands-some of my friends call me instead of texting back-or those who message while driving or those who like to leave nuanced messages will benefit from Pinger.

As a business proposition, Pinger has to tap that niche-tribal confluence of users--where its power is considered compelling, more than a novelty or intrusion. That might require shaping the product and targeting specific groups, say event planners, rather than presenting a general platform for everybody and anybody and hoping something will stick. Maybe the MySpace commenting feature will be the entrypoint. The youth demographic is the most accepting of technological advances.

After having just checked out Jyngle, I have to say that I took Pinger's execution for granted. Everything just works as promised.

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