My friends David Beckemeyer (the brains behind PhoneGnome) and Stuart Henshall (the brains behind a lot of things) recently launched something new called Phweet. It's really in a very early, but public, alpha mode right now, but I thought it was interesting enough to write about.

One of the most popular social networking tools around is Twitter. I've written about Twitter a lot since I began using during its very early days. Twitter provides a messaging and status sharing tool that often leads to conversations that get moved to other domains. Since Twitter began as an SMS-based tool (now it supports the web and a multitude of IM clients), messages (called tweets) are limited to 140 characters.

When a conversation gets into any detail, the brevity of Twitter messages may become an impediment.

We often talk of time-shifting or place-shifting work. Telecommuting and working on the road in mobile mode are perfect examples. Many of the industry thought leaders in unified communications have bandied about the idea of what I'm calling domain shifting. In this case, shifting a conversation from the SMS/Web domain of Twitter to the voice domain of a person-to-person conversation.

The concept is interesting, and up until yesterday Twitterfone, by Pat Phelan, was my primary example. I wrote about it in Twitterfone - Giving Voice to Twitter back in May. Twitterfone moves the traffic from the voice domain to the Twitter domain using speech-to-text translation technology.

Phweet does the opposite, moving a Twitter message into a click-to-call voice domain.

Note - Click on any of the images to hyperlink through to the full-size screen captures.

Here's the basic screen to sign up and start the process -

All you need is a Twitter account and you can send messages that generate a phone call using VoIP services and some nifty integration of technologies. I set up a call and here's what my partner Sheryl sees -


Sheryl received a message with a clickable link to the Phweet call. Here's what I got on my screen once the message sent -


My account is setup to route calls to the SIP number associated with my Gizmo account, but you can route calls to any SIP phone that has a public address. And you can load a Flash tool that allows you to have the voice call right in your browser.

I'm sure this is something you'll be hearing a lot more about. Sheryl and I chatted with David about this on a Phweet call last night. He and Stuart took a very open approach and invited people to start trying it, knowing there would be problems at the alpha testing stage. So far the problems sound like they've been pretty minimal and the feature requests have already started rolling in.

I think it's something that anyone who uses Twitter and ever has reason to move a conversation over to the telephone will find really useful. Another friend, Chris Brogan, does just that sort of thing regularly. Chris is famous for posting "Call Chris for the next two hours at..." and giving out his cell phone number. With Phweet, Chris can invite specific people, but he cal also easily host an open Phweet conference where the bridge call is established and people can come and go as they please, talking with him via voice while his time is free. I've exchanged a couple of messages with Chris and hope to show it to him later today or this evening.

Keep in mind this is just the beginning, but I encourage readers to think about where you might find value in shifting conversations from one domain to another. As we look at Communications Enhanced/Enabled Business Processes (CEPB), these are the sorts of tools we'll see migrating from the open web for fun and experimentation into enterprise business applications of the next generation.