Social audio: a busy space
You know what they say about buses; you wait and wait and then 3 all arrive at the same time. Well, since audioboo launched on 12th March this year, we’ve seen some new competitors enter the space. A very fine welcome to tweetmic and ipadio. To be fair, ipadio seemed to have launched over a year ago but only recently has it begun to get visibility. In this post I’m going to give you an overview of both of them.
Ipadio differs from audioboo in that it essentially records a telephone call, much like our beta service, Phoneboo. The plus side: works on any phone. The downside: appalling audio quality and you get none of the rich metadata that can add so much to an audio piece. I can see this working in companies using a traditional broadcast model to distribute content but it’s definetely not a network or social media platform. In addition, the company seems to have a PR strategy that amounts to lurking on blogs and do that “oh, have you checked out ipadio?” thing everytime someone does an article about audioboo. That’s kind of crappy.
Twitmic is different. It’s an iPhone app that uses your Twitter login to post audio tweets. Plus you get them stored at no additional cost. Nice app, simple but costs a $1. Might put some people off. I’d also argue that tying a new service so closely to Twitter limits further growth in other platforms. Facemic doesn’t really have the same ring.
But it’s exciting that audio, particuarly spoken word audio, has suddenly become such a hot area. It’s long overdue. And here at audioboo we’re glad to have the competition. Because we’ve already got something that no amount of technology goodiness can buy: an active and vibrant community using audio in hundreds of different ways. Whether they are talking amongst themselves, creating great boos or hassling us for new features, what keeps us on our toes is that they care passionately about audioboo. And that really informs the way we think.
i’ve tried them both. they’re ok. tweetmic is good for throw away ‘meet me at such and such a place’ messages. ipadio didn’t impress me. i think ‘competition’ is a little too strong a word for these two at least.
Good luck Mark , wish you all the best. Big old space out there and we both have our converts. I wish you well. Mark
Oh and bet you won’t publish this one
http://www.ipadio.com/phlog.asp?section=&phlogid=890&phlogcastId=1760
If you want to meet up Mark and talk more that’s fine.
Mark – you’ve made some really nasty comments about ipadio’s PR strategy in all kinds of public places.
It is categorically not ipadio’s PR strategy to ‘lurk’ and comment and having been launched publicly for just a month there is a huge amount of offline as well as online coverage being generated – including USA Today, disability publications…
Ipadio has enthusiasts and followers who are bound to flag up when someone could use ipadio, which broadcasts on any phone, from anywhere, live. It includes me. It includes others.
If that upsets you, I can only apologise. Not quite sure why it merits an attack if you don’t consider them competition, but just to set the record straight, I/we have better things to do than ‘lurk’, and there is no policy of lurking. We are probably talking to the same people because they’re the people we need to talk to. Can’t apologise for that.
Ipadio is unashamedly new to the social media space, but this is a space where new things are generally welcomed – although apparently not competition?
It’s a high quality service with some genuinely nice people doing some terrific things. You were aware of them a year ago? You weren’t complaining until they started to get a profile.
I thought we’d had this discussion personally at #media140 but obviously the hatchet’s not quite as buried as I thought.
Surely there’s space for choice for everyone?
Claire – I’ll be quick. This isn’t very high up on my radar, really.
If it’s not your PR strategy to act as bots on other people’s news story, I apologise. I think you’ll understand my confusion from the thread of the link above on lurking, which I’ve reproduced here.
A respected news outlet – Journalism Online – writes an article about audioboo. We didn’t ask them to, we didn’t pay them. They are just interested in the implications of the service for news. However, here’s a brief look at the first comments on that story, which is, again funnily enough, you:
Claire Says:
”I think they should have a look at ipadio (www.ipadio.com). It’s not restricted to the iphone and it’s website is a bit more developed ahead of launching.”
Then Laura Oliver, who wrote the article commented back:
”You may need to put a disclaimer on that Claire!
“ The response from Claire?
“What kind of disclaimer were you thinking of?…… Anyway, do let me know what you’re referring to in the need for the disclaimer. Thanks, Claire”
So Laura responds:
”No – only being cheeky because the URL you submitted with your comment was ipadio.com so thought you might be involved with it in some way.”
The response?
“AAhhh – my own URL’s not up and running yet. (Watch this space)”
Now, I may be, as a simple soul, missing something here but that looks like you posted a comment from an ipadio email address without mentioning you had a vested interest in their product. In the social space, that is an completely untransparent & (downright) unacceptable way to conduct yourself online. You represented yourself as an individual with a valid viewpoint and failed to mention your relationship – presumably paid – with ipadio, which Laura caught you out on. You’ve done this on numerous blogs about audioboo and
I’m just calling you on it, that’s all.
Can we all please move on from this? I think we all have better things to do with our time? Mark the offer above still stands. Contact me if you see fit. I really do wish you well – we each have our own niche to explore and we can co-exist. I for one have no interest in carrying on this type of exchange. We are fundamentally different products – one an upload of audio, one a live stream and recording of a telephone call. Time will tell which is most successful – I will not refer to what you do in anything other than a positive light (and I have never done anything else actually) – you have popped up in space I was already in and you’ve made people think. So have I. It’s a space big enough for us both, so I don’t mind.
Claire – drop this please. Mark – I’m not sure what the emoticon for handshake is? Now can we carry on and concentrate on growing our two businesses in a more polite manner please?
Sorry Mark (Smith), but my reputation is at stake here and I need to clarify something.
The journalism.co.uk piece comment went up before I started working with ipadio. Because I was a fan and think ipadio is great. Which is why I talk about it on Twitter, which seems to be what’s causing the upset.
I agree we should move on, and thought we had before this piece.
I would have thought if ipadio had wished to operate in the social space that AudioBoo now dominates, it would have made that clear from the start.
iPadio is a great service for corporations looking to embrace social media. It offers a flexible message and comms system and does many things.
What it doesn’t do is shout ‘Use Me, I’m Easy’. It offers so many areas of ‘expertise’ that feels undefined and ‘jack of all trades’ to me. That’s great. But it’s not and never has felt really exciting. As a fan of audio I would have welcomed iPadio getting it ‘right’ as quickly as anyone. – but to me it’s a service that points to a bright future for audio, rather than an audio service with a future – at least for my needs: quality of recorded audio, immediacy or archiving and metatagging etc.
The combination of audio quality and simplicity of use for maximum funcitonality is what turned me on about AudioBoo – and continues to. Second to that, is the fact that I feel engaged with the product and it’s community – which is diverse and ‘warm’.
It’s hard not to find the prospect of them ‘stalking’ in this way, anything but a slightly tragic scramble to make sure if AudioBoo is going to get some publicity, they sure as hell are too. I’d of thought there first step would have been to sort out an appalling website?
By the way – i should quite clearly add here, that my ‘personal’ interest in AudioBoo is the amazingly easy way it has been to set up a ‘sub-community’ not for profit project ‘AudioBooTH.net’ to encourage loose musical expression and creative audio.
There’s no other service out there that would have enabled me to do this so easily, with such satisfactory results for collaboration and inspiration. Well, short of me developing my own app and renting some space in the sound cloud!
Thanks for that useful feedback Colt, I wish you well with your project.
I note that the short response to your attack on me personally, posted at 10pm last night, has not been posted by this morning, yet later posts have – so much for batting straight!
I was posting about ipadio in a personal capacity before I did any consultancy work for them because I think they have a great, very usable service.
With regard to the piece that you have taken and posted here, I emailed the journalist in question and let her know.
Interesting, I’m sure Loic Lemeur of Seesmic will be over the moon with someone calling their app Tweetmic. No legal transgression there of course, but brand wise it’s a bit of a bummer. Given the general lack of domain name availability, I suppose it’s inevitable.
I’d never come across ipadio before you mentioned it here. So I had a play with and the only thing that really put me off was the sub-par audio quality.
Where Audioboo excels right now is in delivering a very simple product effectively. Stripping it down to basics. That’s all the end user is really asking for. That’s why Twitter took off in such a big way.
As for the little PR debacle going on here, well technically I suppose Claire Thompson deserves the benefit of the doubt. Although I can see why you might suspect a PR spam campaign. In any case it’s interesting to see how blog comments can easily have a backlash in this era of so-called ‘transparency’.
Thanks Andrew.
Mark (Rock) did me a favour in lots of ways. I have separated off things that could be considered ‘work’ from the things that I am just interested in for absolute clarity.
Ipadio has established a Twitter site called the ipadiomediahub where some of the interesting phlogs (phone blogs) are noted and as a very transparent medium/way of contacting.
The guys at ipadio are all contactable under their own names.
And I’ll carry on telling people about things that I think are interesting under my own name, whether clients or not. I alweays use my own name online, so I’m not trying to hide anything.
I’m sorry to have upset Mark (Rock) so thoroughly and to anyone who feels I’ve been misleading. I hope that the line has been drawn under this and that he feels better for having ‘called’ me.
I’m a bit of a Boo fan, but is it really AudioBoo’s job to try and tell us what we should or shouldn’t use?
I’d have thought on their own Blog it’s entirely their job to encourage adoption of their service…..wouldn’t you?
Presently I’m writing an article about how to improve a student’s oral production skills with the help of tools like audioboo and/or ipadio
As a foreign language teacher (English/French) I wonder why so few teachers use this powerful tool.
Actually, I’m desperately looking for good practice examples and can’t find any!!!
Could you give me a hand an point out some sites where colleagues use audioboo in some sort of a virtual classroom.
Sensible assignments would be very welcome as well.
Even the names and emailadresses of teachers that might want to share their experience would be most welcome.
I wonder if you can help me.
Best regards
Jürgen