Phone Calls Come To Twitter. Don't Bother To @Call Me.

Phone calls on Twitter?  You’re joking right?  Unfortunately, it’s no joke.  Jajah, a VOIP company who provides a number of calling solutions, today, announced their latest product JaJah@Call. Sure, it may seem like an interesting or even cool idea on the surface, but, I don’t see the point of it in the grand scheme of things.

This service which will be offered by JaJah is, to put it simply, more noise in a growing echo chamber. I get that you have to be following the person and that both people have to have JaJah accounts in order for it to work – I get that. That is really besides the whole point here though. What we have here is a new service that allows people to call you for two minutes (at least for now) to essentially tell you what they would have @replied to you with. What? Is it just me or does that seem really stupid?

Think about it. Let us look a few things here with regard to why (most) people use Twitter.

1. So many people can see what you are doing or what you have to say at once.
2. It’s quick, simple, and to the point.
3. You don’t have to actually know the person to follow them or interact with them.
4. Many tweets are meaningless to the majority of people.
5. It’s a great marketing channel.

What place does JaJah@Call have in this market? None. It’s a completely pointless feature – it’s just fluff.

I have never once thought to myself “Oh, if only I could call x person and tell them what I thought of their tweet”, if anything, I’ll either @reply them or just retweet it if I think it’s worthwhile. Additionally, I really am not interested in having people call me about what I’m tweeting or to tell me something. Wouldn’t you rather just tweet to everyone? If you want a tweet to be private, direct message the person (that is actually the only use I see for this service, think of it as “live voicemail”).

Nonetheless, I would rather have people retweet or @reply me so even more people see what I’m doing on Twitter. Not to mention, how annoying this could possibly be. I can only imagine the block lists people may accumulate especially if you follow a large number of people and have a large following.

Twitter is a great communication tool, it really is, but it just isn’t the place for making phone calls.  I don’t see many people actually using this service at least after the initial novelty wears off.  Now if phone call capabilities came to Facebook (which I hear they might) then that might prove useful.