Utellit offers social voicemail

Yesterday I came across a new app / Facebook integration called Utellit. The principal is actually pretty simple – so much so that I wondered why I couldn’t do this all along.  Utellit allows you to use your iPhone (Android app in development now) to record a voice message and post it on your friends’ Facebook wall (or as a Tweet, if you prefer).  Simple, right?

Utellit was born because its developer realized something important.  We’ve gotten LAME.  Specifically, when it’s someone’s birthday, we all tend to do the same thing.  Go to their wall and write “Happy Birthday!”, or some variation of that.  In fact, this is such a common action that Facebook no longer requires you to take the overwhelming time to actually visit their wall.  Now you can simply click on their birthday announcement in the top right corner of your home feed and you’ll get a text box to post your birthday wishes.  Lame?  Yeah, kinda.

With Utellit, you can simply open the app and get a list of anyone who has a birthday today, record a voice message (perhaps you’d like to sing Happy Birthday a la Marilyn Monroe?) and post it to their wall.  An inline player allows the recipient to play your message right from their wall.  That’s actually pretty cool.

I can see this app seriously picking up steam in the coming weeks, mostly because the functionality is such that it really should have been there all along.  Can you say Facebook acquisition?  We’ll see, but it would make sense to me.

My only beef with the app so far is the way it works when viewing the messages from mobile, though I’m told by the developer that they are working on that.  The inline player won’t show up in the post, so for a user to listen to the message on a mobile device they have to click a link.  That’s not really a big deal. The link takes the user to an HTML5 player.  The problem is that the link says “Get utellit to send messages like this!”, which one would reasonably assume is actually a link to get the app, not hear the message.  They’ll have to clean that up and make it more logical but I’m sure they will.

Here’s a video of the developer explaining the “Why” behind Utellit: