Twitter has always been a playground for third party companies to integrate their services and thus enhance the user experience. Jajah, a VoIP provider has launched a service in beta which will allow twitter users to make free two mins call to other twitter users.
How does the service work?
- Register for Jajah@call service
- To call a Twitter user just type “@call @username” – where “username” is someone’s Twitter ID
- Both the user should follow each other on Twitter and also have accounts at Jajah services.
The service is free to use and is expected to work on any Twitter-enabled device, from PCs to smart phones. The call duration in current phase would be for just two minutes and the service being still in beta is available to very few users.
The service would help in creating awareness for Jajah products at the same time facilitating twitter users to make short free calls from the twitter interface.
Should SNS sites Officially support Third party services?
The interest of third party developers to integrate their services into Social networks is largely due to the huge following these services commands. Facebook just recently announced its crossing of 300 million user strength and even twitter is growing at a very strong growth rate.
Vivox recently announced introduction of Voice chat support for facebook.The site is also credited with enabling voice chat features in Second Life and many other social networking platform. The chat feature is unofficial and in no way supported by Facebook.
The need for official support arises when power users of the social networking platform starts migrating to other services more frequently from the main interface itself. In case of twitter the absence of re-tweeting and many other power features was the main reason for users flocking to third party apps and services. This spurted the frequent use of Twitter from API and other third party apps. By an estimate Twitter API Traffic is 10x Twitter’s Site traffic.
In Facebook’s case the introduction of API is still new as not many apps are built around accessing the feeds and features. Although that scenario is changing as many apps like Digsby, Scrapboy, Seesmic are now supporting some advance features of Facebook at the comfort of desktop rather than going on to web.
For SNS supporting third party services officially is a cost effective way to enhance User experience before dolling out same features internally. The close integration could also help in retaining the users and enhancing value for users to continue using the same platform and plethora of services.
The official support to reputable third party apps also helps in avoiding hijacking of user information as Users are very well aware in regards to the use of services and their support. Thus let’s hope facebook and twitter in their quest to become more open also embrace the cult of third party apps in an official supporting manner so as to add significant value for users in lesser time-frame.
