You may not know this, but Twitter is actually not that great.   The website itself is clunky. Add-ons are what made it successful.   Sometimes Twitter has acquired them, like with TweetDeck, and sometimes they have created their own once the market has shown them to be popular.

The photo sharing website TwitPic started in 2008 as a way to share photos easily on Twitter.  Life was good, Twitter became popular.  Then Twitter announced its own photo-sharing services in June, with the added caveat that creators would own the rights to their photos so they can't be redistributed without permission.   That makes Twitpic unessential, the same way Tweetdeck made TinyURL.com unessential.

But the TwitPic folks know a thing or two about building a successful property and can't have been thrilled they were now unimportant to Twitter fans.  So they have started their own microblogging format, called Heello.   The nomenclature will be familiar to tech folks - a message, what Twitter calls a tweet - is a ping on Heello but a retweet is called an echo.    Now, it would seem that a retweet would be called a ping, since a ping is essentially a hello between computers, but that doesn't matter, tweet is actually not a name that makes sense either.   If it works, it becomes the intuitive thing.

The advantage Heello may have?   From their site, you can simultaneously update Facebook and Twitter, which saves people time if they do marketing on multiple networks.   And there is a lot of marketing on Twitter.  I had to filter some people because not only do they spam the world with every blog post of their own, they spam us with all of their fellow corporate site blogs and then compendiums of the blogs, etc.  

But hey, I'm no dummy.  By all means follow me on Twitter!   We have no corporate marketing either so word of mouth is all we have.  I'd tell you my Heelloo URL but I keep getting a "There was an error loading this webpage. Please try again later" error when creating an account so Twitter is not worried just yet.