Twitterfone: My innovating friends strike again

I couldn’t be more proud of what my friends Pat Phelan and Florian Seroussi, with their associated partners in innovation, have done. You may know Pat as the Irish disruptor behind Cubic Telecom’s Maxroam, and Florian as the French-Israeli who spearheads Celtrek. Now they’ve brought super-easy voice-to-Twitter capability from dream to reality with Twitterfone, and it’s been an instant hit. Pat recaps the first 24 hours since launch:

The total coverage was beyond anything I have ever seen in 24hrs, 148 blog mentions, 1690 mentions on Google…[O]nly 3 customers problems in first 24hrs, lots and lots of users, all seemingly happy. 10,102 sign-ups. Twitterfone France being launched tomorrow. We intend to add a couple of countries a week and will be distributing invites on a daily basis.

In short, you call a local number and speak your Twitter update. The system (with which you have shared your Twitter login details) then turns your voice message into a text update to Twitter, and also inserts a link so that your followers can listen to the actual audio if they’d like. I used the service four times within an hour of launch, as I ran around Houston’s airport. Click here to see and hear an example of what someone gets when they read the text update in my Twitter stream and then click through on the link to Twitterfone.

When Pat told me about Twitterfone a couple of months ago, I knew that my Twitter-enabled friends would love it. One of those friends (who is not given to hyperbole), Jeff Nolan, calls Twitterfone “simply perfection”. The users seem to agree. Well done, guys!