Chhirp! Chhirp!
Our second Cord project is a mic button for Twitter.
Today, World Voice Day, we’re sharing an app built to tweet your voice.
It’s called Chhirp. Get it?
You may ask “What about Cord?! I’ve been waiting for [insert awesome feature here] forever!” Rest assured Cord user, we’re still hard at work everyday making Cord better. As a Cord project, Chhirp is really just an experiment that will help inform the direction of Cord in the future. Lots of people use Cord in a lot of different ways and Cord projects let us test some of our bigger ideas before rolling them into the full app.
A ton of Cord messages are sent to two or more people. Some of you may have heard a Happy Friday from Jeff or use groups to chat with a small group. But we’re really excited about people being able to share short voice messages to even wider audiences. Naturally we began thinking about a ‘broadcast’ mode as something worth exploring. So we had a little sprint (two weeks to be precise) to design and build Chhirp to see what happens when anyone can broadcast their voice with the press of a button.
So what’s Chhirp exactly? It’s a simple marriage of our short audio messaging platform and Twitter’s API & Audio Cards. You log in with Twitter, press & hold to record, then share. Chhirps are instantly shared to all of your followers on Twitter and Chhirp. Followers can listen to chhirps anywhere they browse Twitter, whether it’s on iOS, Android, or the web.
Every chhirp is a tweet.
Of course, you can listen to chhirps from within the Chhirp app, either as a stream or as looping audio clips. We also pull the best chhirps together into a ‘hot’ section so everyone using Chhirp can hear the best stuff. Finally, every chhirp gets a unique short URL so you can share or embed your audio almost anywhere on the Web.
Services like Vine and Instagram have simplified and democratized the production of video and photo content. We now see as many videos and photos in our social streams as text and links. But audio, with the exception of music, has been left out. With Chhirp, we’re aiming to make sharing a short bit of audio as easy as sharing a snapshot or a video.
Thanks to the power of voice, Chhirp brings nuance, emotion, multiple speakers, ambiance and more to your tweets, without losing the brevity and immediacy of Twitter. It’s worth remembering that Twitter came out of a podcasting company. They ultimately chose text as the medium because SMS was the most universal way to operate at that time. But things have changed a lot since 2006 and now audio can be shared across the Web in a fraction of a second, right from your smartphone — and soon from your watch.
We think it’s time time voice made a comeback and we can’t wait to hear what people say…
