TwitPic founder launches Twitter competitor, Heello

Twitter and TwitPic founder Noah Everett don't exactly get along ever since the former announced its own in-house picture service, executed by Photobucket. There would be no better time nor reason for Everett to launch his own micro-blogging social media service, which is why he did. Noah Everett, today, launched Heello, his answer to Twitter.

Heello works -- mostly -- exactly like Twitter does in practically every single way, except the nomenclature is different. Instead of tweets, users can "ping." Instead of retweeting, you're invited to "echo" a "ping." And unlike the perhaps ill-fated connotation of following, you can "listen" to users' pings. However, the basic function is the same: you read updates from friends at 140 characters per... ping, you can see a specific ping at a time, you can reference another user by using the @ symbol, and you get a stream of everyone's pings that you're listening to on the homepage.

The main difference: you can share these on Twitter and Facebook. Though it's wise in a self-advertising aspect, we don't imagine Heello needs much more coverage than it's perhaps going to get from just the fact that it launched and who its founder is.

Everett didn't exactly make it a secret that he was disappointed with Twitter's self-hosted pictures announcement — even more so that the company didn't think to contact TwitPic. That service fully launched yesterday. Twitter, furthermore, has gotten into some quibbles from developers' ends for adding features third parties usually took care of, sometimes rendering their applications or services useless, all of which spurred when the company created its official application for iPhone by acquiring then-Tweetie.

Twitter is certainly not the first in the micro-blogging game, but it definitely has gained the most traction and popularity. Though Heello seems easy and intuitive enough to use (besides the fact that when I was trying it out, the service told me I had exceeded my 140 character limit when in reality I had five characters left) but it obviously remains to be seen if it will take off or just be seen as a clone.