Chatterous: Reach All of Your Friends on their Communications Weapon of Choice - SendMeRSS
Posted by elveston priory at 10:32 pm
Chatterous is a simple new communications tool that may be a time saver of sorts. It allows you setup a group of your friends and send them a message that they can receive on their phone (via sms), gchat, or email.
Your friends can then reply via that medium (without registering for Chatterous) and you can see a view of their replies in a format similar to your Twitter friend timeline. People in the group of friends can also keep tabs on the conversation, as replies are also sent to all of them.
The service solves a fairly straight-forward problem – reaching all of your friends at the same time, regardless of where they are. While at the moment it still doesn't necessarily solve that problem since it only integrates with 3 services, the plan with Chatterous is to integrate it with many different communication platforms in the same way – including Meebo and Twitter in the near future.
As for the potential spam problem, Chatterous seems to have dealt with it properly so far, requiring recipients on all three mediums to opt-in before they can receive messages, and allowing you to opt-out of a conversation at any point.
Chatterous is definitely a no frills app, but the way they've designed it so registration is only required for the person that wants to initiate a conversation could help the service take off. If you're thinking that Twitter basically solves the same problem, the difference is that Twitter requires everyone to have an account.
The company is founded by Kenshi Arasaki and Wilkins Chung, and funded by Y Combinator.