Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Pheeder - Multicast Shouts thru Cell Phone Networks
A former student of mine at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, John Geraci (creator of NeighborNode) has a new project out called Pheeder. It's another one of the NYC-style social cell phone apps like Dodgeball that are designed around roaming groups of hip young singles who want to coordinate social events and meals in the city. Dodgeball lets you send text messages when you arrive at a bar or restaurant to your friends everywhere, and to friends of friends who are nearby.
Pheeder is the next generation of these SMS social apps - while its not location aware - it lets you call a hotline and leave an audio message, which is then blasted out immediately to your social network. You can subscribe to feeds that people create and have your phone ring off the hook constantly. It's sort of like Dodgeball meets audioblogging.
I was having drinks the other night with Sean Savage of Placesite and we were talking about how essentially zero cost wireless VoIP would lead people to keep audio chats open pretty much all the time as they move about the city. Combine that with a syndication mechanism like Pheeder and you're basically talking about a world where everyone has an audio stream of aggregated voices feeds coming in from their social network automatically. Sounds like telepathy to me....
