Multimedia messaging service Utterz is launching an expanded offering Monday morning that will allow users from 17 additional countries outside of the US to post to the service with their mobile phones. Utterz combines voice, video, photos and text to facilitate conversations either on the Utterz site, through Twitter or on your own blog off-site.
In addition to the local phone numbers for 17 additional countries, Utterz is also launching threaded conversations (small but important), webcam video capture and a newly designed site. The cow motif will likely stay, but whatever. (Update: Upon seeing the relaunched site, there’s actually a whole lot less cow action! I kind of miss the cow, now that it’s gone.)
There’s a lot of nice little touches here, check out this embedded player from Utterz for example. That’s pretty cool. Except the text is too small.
On Seesmic
The most logical company to compare Utterz to is Loic Le Meur’s
, which I wrote last week
with the leading micromessaging social platform
.
Utterz has far more features than Seesmic and is also very well thought out, at times. It’s not as slick and usable as Seesmic. You can fall off a log and participate in Seesmic, once you’ve gotten access to the closed alpha at least (and gotten over any aversion you have to Silicon Valley hype). The feature gap is big enough, really, that the two may as well be different services. Seesmic is a good place to go and have short video conversations. Utterz is a service you can use to have more complicated and flexible conversations in mixed media. With Utterz you can post an audio message first to your account, then edit the message to add images and text, then have it all appear as a blog post on your off-site blog ten minutes later. That’s pretty cool.
Growing Utterz
For whatever reason, Utterz is also growing much slower than Seesmic, despite the fact that there’s no invitation required. Utterz says, and I agree, though that there are so many people in this world with a cell phone that there’s not much use squabbling over whether one startups few thousand early users are more than another’s.
When I asked Utterz though what their path to market would be, they told me it would be “focusing on a particular set of topical interests, like political dialog.” Snore.
The strangely disconcerting anti-hero cow mascot and the general clunkyness of the site aside, though, Utterz is a good service. Once users get used to using it, though, I think many will like it quite a bit. Enabling users in 17 additional countries to come on board is a great move and one I’m sure RWW readers will appreciate.
The list of newly included countries follows:
Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
