#vowal

After speaking with Dan Miller (@dnm54) from Opus Research on several occasions about the appeal of near-time communications and the the Voxer application, I decided to extend the Tropo application that we built for BurningMan so that anyone can now create an account and add events and phone numbers to create their own near-time communications experience for an event.  The nice thing about this technology is that it works with any telephone - no app download is required!

As luck would have it, I was looking up domains related to Voice Walls and noticed that Vowal.com was available and so was @Vowal on Twitter.  This domain is 1 letter off from Vowel which is cool because without vowels, you can't speak - feel free to quote me on that :)

Vowal basically a Voice and SMS message wall that allows people to call in and record voice memos and/or listen to other social voice memos that others have left on the event's voice wall too.  If more than 1 person calls into Vowal at the same time, the voice memo being recorded automatically turns into a party line / conference call that also gets recorded and added to the voice wall when all parties hang up.

Vowal is also a Group SMS platform similar to GroupMe or Beluga.  Anyone who has texted a message into the event number or called and left a voice memo on the wall becomes eligible to receive message updates from people texting into the event number.  You can send an SMS message to the event number and it gets repeated to all mobile numbers that have interacted with the event.

Vowal also has a web interface.  You can refer people to vowal.com/event_name and the page plays voice wall memos from newest to older ones and marks them as read.  The page also pulls in a Flickr photo for every voice memo with the event name as the Flickr tag.  The page also includes Phono on the page allowing people to call into the event and leave a voice memo or join the party line directly from the browser.  This allows people not at the event to be more engaged with what is happening remotely.