A couple months ago I was out with my friend Sara and her best friend from out of town, Meesh. The three of us were roaming SF and of course, like any other group of 20-some year old girls in the city, we were all fixated on our smartphones the entire evening. Totally normal. But, as we’re sitting on the curb of Kearny and Market, waiting for the 30 to come to take us to Maggie McGarry’s after watching Red Riding Hood, Meesh asks, “Do you have heytell?” I’m confused, “What?” I ask. She then explains to me how her and her group of girlfriends use heytell to communicate. It’s a free app that allows you to send short voice messages, instead of text. “Interesting,” I say, “do you like it?” She pauses to send a quick heytell to her friend, (awkward because she has to stop our conversation to record a message), and then plays back what her friend last said to her on speaker so I could see how it worked. Apparently she and her friends loved it but she was wondering if it was killing her battery. She ended up removing the app right then and there to reserve precious battery power, while rationalizing out loud, “they’re waking me up with ridiculous messages anyway.” (They being her friends). 

I completely forgot about this incident, thinking it was just another app that was bound to fail until I read this piece in iconoculture:

http://www.iconoculture.com/SMART/public/view.aspx?ContentID=281493

HeyTell now has a base of over 4 million users.

What does this mean? Surely sending a voice clip is not much easier, if at all, than sending a text. It’s also less private seeing as how you have to say your message out loud, instead of discreetly tapping it with your thumbs. I think this shows people want the flexibility and efficiency of sending a quick message, BUT they want to bring back some of the emotional connection of actually speaking to someone. Social media and technology has made us anti-social. Now people are combining the benefits of not having to have a lengthy conversation that technology has provided us, but bringing back some of the intimacy of a real conversation.

My 2 cents.