Pinger.com – Voice Messenger for your Cell

Note: This has been updated. See bottom.

Pinger.com is an instant voice message service for your cell phone.

I am actually surprised someone hasn’t come out with something similar. It’s one of those ideas that you figure would have been already done. I guess those are the good ones, eh? I went ahead and signed up for the beta that’s currently going on. Some impressions:

The sign up process was pretty smooth. Their voice tree is also pretty simple. “*” being backwards or undo and “#” being forward. Their interface is also nice.

Setting up your contacts is relatively easy as they have various import options for Thunderbird, Outlook, and so forth. One thing about the contacts, though, (and I know it’s still in beta) is they don’t have a “Nickname” option. The contacts and message sending are handled through your phone where you say the persons first & last name and it then identifies them. It would be much smoother if I could simply say a friends Nickname.

You can send a voice message to both those who are a part of Pinger and those who aren’t. If you’re a part of Pinger and someone sends you a voice message, you’ll receive a txt on your cell which you can then use to listen to the message. If you’re not a part of Pinger the message is sent to your e-mail (which you can have it do even if you are a part of Pinger). The messages seem a little soft when you listen to them through the web interface, but are great through the cell.

All in all I’m impressed. The only downfalls I see right off is the fact that they only ask for the e-mail address in contact information. Because of this, if you’re not a part of Pinger, the only way for your friend to receive your message is to check their e-mail – if they check their e-mail. I’m a bit surprised they don’t have it linked in with cell numbers for contacts. Additionally, it’s missing the “Ping me!” widget that can be put on sites to allow others to ping you, among other things.

Either way, I’m in the beta now and I look forward to seeing just what becomes of Pinger.com. It’s a great idea. I wonder how it will do in conjunction with text messaging.

Update 09/19/06:

I meant to update this sooner, but after I posted this I decided to contact Pinger and give them my opinions. I thought I’d say that there seem to be a great bunch of people who are a part of the company. As opposed to ignoring me as most companies would, I got a quick response. It wasn’t just automated, mind you, or brushing me off, the person responding actually gave his thoughts and thanks to my suggestions. In addition, we discussed them a bit more, and he said he’d forward it on (which I surely believe he will). As it stands now, Pinger seems to have great customer service and a care for the opinions and suggestions of their users. Those are some very nice aspects to have in a company.

Update 2 12/27/06

Pinger continues to impress me. While I can’t say I have been avidly using their service, the support they provide and dedication to a quality product is great. After having received the comment I did (you can see it below) I decided to forward it on to Pinger and let them decide whether or not this security risk was in fact the case or not. While I was a bit frustrated not having an actual support email address available to contact (something that should be easy to locate if you’re a business on the internet), I did find a contact address (though I don’t know if it was correct) and used that. To my surprise, the person responded thanking me for forwarding him the information and basically said that their development staff was already aware of potential risks and were working to solve them. I have no idea what exactly the guy responded to me does (business etiquette, anyone?), but none the less I felt like he would indeed forward the information on. Thank you for responding, Pinger, and keep up the good service!