Tuesday, May 16, 2006

The beta of Radio Handi, billing itself as the Party Line for Planet Earth, went live this evening.  In a nutshell, Radio Handi is an open-line conferencing+BBS+Email notification system+SMS notification system, married to a social network. 

Wrap your head around that for a minute. 

You can do things like:

• quickly relay voice messages about news or events to people in your family, or a club, or the neighborhood
• relay text and email messages to everyone in the group
• conduct live conference calls with up to 20 people calling in from almost anywhere in the world
• broadcast live audio to any phone or MP3 player
• create a party line for your neighborhood
• create message boards and chat lines for any subject
• create a sponsored voice community to promote your business (for example, a scuba shop could create a message board and conference line for local divers)
• create a message board and conference line for your alumni organization
• exchange messages with fellow hobbyists
• broadcast audio and commentary from any live event, such as a high school sporting event
• broadcast classes, lectures and presentations
• broadcast live from any location where you have mobile phone service or a broadband internet connection

Oh, and by the way, they’ve built a phone directory to global radio stations too, so you can listen in.

Radio Handi is accesible in over 30 countries via a local telephone call, or toll free via SIP.  They recommend Gizmo.  Strangely enough, they’ve got numbers for places like Latvia and Luxembourg listed, but not Canada.  It must be a hangover from the bad relationship Jean Chretien’s Liberals built with George Bush…

At this point, the social networking piece of Radio Handi is limited.  The profiles are weak, and there doesn’t seem to be an effective way to search them.  Rather, you can search for a community to join, and find people that way.  There’s room for improvement for sure.

This is a hugely exciting development.  Just recently, a few of us have been musing on why social networks hadn’t been combined with voice, and then along comes this.  You can find out more on the website, or you can go read the Radio Handi blog as well. 

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