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"Entrepreneur Noah Everett, the sole founder of photo and video sharing service Twitpic, has relaunched its 'Twitter clone', real-time communications platform Heello, in quiet beta.\r\n\r\nI'm calling it a quiet beta because, although the site is live and users can log in and send 'pings' through the service already, Heello itself is deeming it a pre-beta launch dry run or something.\r\n\r\nIn other words, be prepared for some bugs when you use it, even though I honestly haven't encountered any when trying out the service today.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nHeello is positioned as an 'open, real-time sharing platform' that lets you easily share what\u2019s happening through photos, videos and native check-ins to locations, publicly or in private messages ('pings').\r\n\r\nFrom the website:\r\n\r\n&amp;quot;As other social networks are walling themselves off, we are committed to providing an open ecosystem for everyone, with our user\u2019s best interest always in mind. \r\n\r\nAlso as a user you will always own your data. \r\n\r\nHeello is for Developers: We believe that developers are an important part to a successful platform. We want to provide developers with an easy platform and a friendly ecosystem to build on without worry of being pushed off.&amp;quot;\r\n\r\nThat's a clear middle finger directed at Twitter. It also makes Heello sound an awful lot like Dalton Caldwell's App.net project (and Diaspora, remember that?), but free of charge - at least for now.\r\n\r\nDevelopers who are interested in building stuff on top of Heello's platform are invited to check out the company's API documentation.\r\n\r\nIt's also worth noting that iOS and Android apps are in the works.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nEverett has been working on Heello since 2010, and I thought he'd abandoned the idea when he launched a new venture called Helpmint back in July 2012. Obviously, I was wrong.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, it looks like his longtime compadre Ryan LeFevre is no longer working on Heello or Twitpic. We've reached out for more information.\r\n\r\n\u27A4 Heello.com (beta)\r\n\r\nImage credit: Thinkstock"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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