This post originally appeared at Catch This.
I’m a big fan of Twitter, and these days I rely on it more than anything else on the interwebs to keep me up to date with what’s happening. Seems like there’s something new every day to enhance it, from ways to edit and embed pictures (Instagram, sold for $1 billion dollars) to services to share short audio clips (AudioBoo being one of the first and best) to all the different Twitter clients that exist (too many to list).
Today I heard about a service called JustSayin that allows you to have an actual conversation – that is, voice postings – with the people you follow (and who follow you) on Twitter. And it was brought to my attention by an actual celebrity whom I follow – Ricky Gervais, who’s learned how to use Twitter properly and interacts with his fans on a daily basis. He’s apparently had a hand in developing this app, and has already posted messages like this (and gotten lots of responses).
Will this app take off? Hard to say. I spent a little bit of time listening to the responses to Gervais’ posts and they were kinda, well, boring and awkward. (Except for the guy who played the Darth Vader theme on one string of his guitar. That was cool.) I can see how it might be great for the original poster to hear the voices of the people who want to respond, but let’s face it, most people are more articulate when they’re typing than when they’re speaking. It would be thrilling to have Gervais or Neil Gaiman or Adam Savage respond personally to me on JustSayin, but I doubt that’s going to happen.
The name is interesting, but I think there are a few serious issues with it. First, as you might have noticed, the parent company (CloudTalk) is using the domain .in for the website (it’s in India). But it’s not, as I mistakenly thought, justsay.in – that redirects to the personal website of a dude named Justin Greis, who works at Ernst & Young. They went with jstsay.in, which is a heck of a lot harder to remember. Why drop just the first vowel? Why not drop the “a” in “say” to make it more consistent? CloudTalk get points for creative use of the .in domain, but minus a few for memorability.
There’s also the problem that #justsaying is a popular hashtag on Twitter already, being used everyday by lots of people to preemptively remove offense from the offensive thing they’ve just tweeted. Thephrase already has the connotation of being a little dishonest, a little passive-aggressive, and it may be hard to shake that meaning. And the existing use of the hashtag will mean that it’s more difficult to promote JustSayin-the-product on Twitter.
But maybe it’s edgy and cool and I’m just too old to get it. If the product works and catches on, then the name will probably succeed in spite of its difficulties. And hopefully they did a trademark search. Hey, I’m just saying…
Overall Grade: B