I was reading up on Amazon's S3 Service today and I came across an interesting new site called Chinswing. The name is a bit odd, but the small Melbourne, Australia based site is very interesting. The site is an interesting combination of forums ala PhpBB and voice blogging. What it creates is a conversation that is sequential and can be downloaded as a podcast. The site is still new so there is not much content up there yet, but I can see that this could be fun to follow.
To use the site, you record a greeting of yourself saying hello or whatever, using an embedded java applet that is on your profile page. From there you can start your own voice thread to which other users can respond. The recordings are presented by the site itself in sequential order using a player that is very intuitive. It is kind of fun to listen to the threads played back this way, instead of the usual feedreader or BB text forum experience. The whole thing sounds like a conversation that just plays through.
What's cool about this, as the site points out, is that you can have conversation that spans across time boundaries. Sometimes I feel that it just doesn't feel right to respond to a voicemail with another voicemail. Most voice message systems are voice bulletin boards give you too much information in between the speech fragments. If you want to know what I mean, just try and listen to all the messages in your mobile phone or office voicemail. By the time you do that you realize half of what you heard is the annoying Max Headroom voice telling you how many messages you have just listened to, etc.
Another drawback of voice messaging of course is that it is really designed to replace a point-to-point phone call. That's why it is called a "voice mail message" and not a "Voice Dialog", I suppose. The message paradigm does not work well when multiple people are involved. Chinswing's model allows you to be a conversationalist, or just a listener if you are lazy (like me). It has a social quality to it since it makes it easy to follow discussions even if you do not want to add to them. You can participate by sharing and observing.
Chinswing is elegantly simple. Conversations sound like polite conversations and they play through automatically. I haven't tried listening to it as a podcast yet, but I will once there is more content. What is missing now is that there are few threads on the site at the moment. Also it would be nice to have group threads that can be private instead of the default public ones. The service has a way to go but I think that this is going to be useful.
I have not had a quiet place to record my voice intro yet, but I plan to. Who knows, maybe we can have a conversation there sometime? My Chinswing name is kwalsh, as you probably have guessed by now.
