New ways to connect to friends - using URLs and Siri!

You can now provide friends with direct-connection URLs in HeyTell! When they open the web page from their phone, they can connect to you automatically, as long as your privacy is set to Low or you've connected before!

In addition, if you're using Siri, you can set up a contact to open HeyTell and select a friend to talk to!

To build a direct-connect URL for HeyTell:

1. On iOS, Open the Profile page, tap Change, then select the contact you've set as yourself. On Android, tap Menu > Profile. Ensure that the string you want friends to use to contact you is set inside your email or phone number fields.

IMPORTANT! If you don't want to share your email address or phone number with the world, we recommend adding a contact here that you do not mind sharing publicly - for example, a long, unique string in the phone number field, a throwaway email address, or a Twitter handle to protect your privacy. Check out the Voxilate Privacy Policy for more information.

2. After changing your "This is Me!" contact, set your privacy to Low.

3. Build your URL! If you provided an email entry, your URL will look like:

http://heytell.com/user/?email=username@userdomain.com

where support@heytell.com is the data you added in your email field.

If you provided a phone number entry, your URL will look like:

http://heytell.com/user/?tel=13015555555

(don't forget your country code!)

Launching HeyTell from Siri

If you're using Siri, you can create a new contact, for example, we created a contact called "HeyTell Support" with a home page set to heytell://contact/email:myusername@mydomain.com. You can also annotate a current contact - just add a home page entry with heytell://contact/email:username@userdomain.com or heytell://contact/tel:13015555555 where their email address or phone number (including country code) is included in the URL.

Then, we asked Siri to "Contact HeyTell Support."

When she finds the contact, tap "home page" and HeyTell will open--if the user you selected matches, their name will appear in the To: field and you can HeyTell them right away! If more than one user matches the contact information, you'll be presented with a list to select from!

A few caveats: When adding a new contact, sometimes it takes Siri a bit of time to recognize it, but eventually, she'll figure it out!

As always, if you run into any issues or have questions, drop us a line at support@heytell.com, android@heytell.com, pop onto the Facebook page at https://facebook.com/heytell, drop us a tweet on Twitter at https://twitter.com/heytell, or join us at Google + at http://heytell.com/+!

A few notes on HeyTell 2.3 for iOS!

We've got a few fun changes for HeyTell 2.3, so we thought we'd write a little bit more about 'em!

Alert Tones: We added a new extra that plays alert tones. You can set a global tone for all incoming messages, and can also set unique tones for friends and groups. You can also configure it to play the alert tone when a message comes in while the app is open. While there are a bunch of ring tones to choose from, we encourage you to check out the Dog Whistle ringtone - 50% of our team can hear it, and 50% can't - can you?

A new Voice Changer option: Alien voice allows you to speed up or slow down your voice - sound like a chipmunk, munchkin, or slow yourself down. If you've already got the Voice Changer extra, the option will automatically appear for you after upgrade.

Export messages to Twitter: We've had a lot of requests for this - you can now, in addition to posting to Facebook and email, you can post messages you sent to Twitter, SMS, or export a link. Note that messages you export this way are publicly viewable for anyone who has access to the link. To export this way, tap the blue arrow next to the conversation, select the message you want to export, then tap the Actions button and select the type of Online Sharing you want to perform.

New translations: We've added Portuguese, Norwegian, and Italian translations - many, many thanks go out to John André Netland for contributing the Norwegian translation and to Gabriele Ravanetti for assistance on the Italian version!

Bug fixes: You may find a few other bugs resolved - note that we continue to recommend using released and supported operating systems only, but if you do run into issues, definitely drop us an email - and a big thanks to everyone who's contacted us so far, we do appreciate the issue reports!

April Fool Public Relay Weekend!

Thanks for trying out the public relay - what a great time! We had over 150 people join the relay over the weekend - some participating, some just listening in. Topics of discussion included mobile technology, accessibility, snake breeding, and oh-so-many things. Messages sometimes flew so furiously that our phones couldn't keep up!

We got a lot of good feedback, and we're going to go back and figure out how to make group chat even better. We've learned a lot and discovered a lot of issues -- and we think we have good ideas on how to improve them while keeping the spontaneous nature of public chat alive. It's too much fun not to!

But if you need your HeyTell group chat fix, there's hope on the horizon. In the next month or so we're going to allow users (iOS & Android!) who have the Groups extra to create Shared Groups, which allow group members to "Reply All." Stay tuned!

Make a Tap-To-Talk Link for HeyTell on iPhone

Did you know that you can create a link that lets others connect to you on HeyTell? You'll need an iOS device and a Facebook account and can put this link in web pages, emails, Twitter...wherever you want others to chat with you - iOS and Android users can connect to you by tapping this link on their mobile devices.

Here are the steps:

1. Go to the Profile tab on HeyTell and connect to your Facebook account.
2. Find your Facebook ID. This is the tricky part, and you'll have to log into the Facebook web page to do this. Go to your profile and mouse-over your profile picture, then look at the status bar for a URL with a number at the end. The format should be something like "id=123456789". We are interested in just the digits; this is your Facebook UID. (More detailed instructions here)
3. Your tap-to-talk link will have the format:

http://heytell.com/user/?fb=#####

Replace ##### with your numeric Facebook UID. (EDIT: You can also view the link by going to the HeyTell Application on Facebook)

You can paste this link wherever you want, and as long as you have your Privacy Level set to Low, others can chat with you just by tapping the link on their mobile device!

This is an experimental feature, so please let us know how it works out! We'll be adding more (and easier, and for Android!) ways to connect in the future!

More HeyTell Server Upgrades

We've been working hard upgrading our servers to handle all of our new users -- and the majority of the work is complete. We think the new system is a lot snappier and more reliable, and we're going to post the following graphs to keep ourselves honest:

This is the uptime for the main HeyTell service, and as you can see there were a few outages over the last few weeks as we worked through a few issues with the upgrade. The high number of outages reported (162) are due to some transient network problems that were reported as multiple outages, and our daily two-minute maintenance period (which is no longer needed).

You can come back here any time and view the graph, which is updated daily.

Please report any problems you encounter to support@heytell.com!

Happy 1st Birthday, HeyTell!

HeyTell just hit its first birthday, and what an incredible first year it's been! On February 10, 2010, fresh off the adrenalin of the Saints' Super Bowl victory in New Orleans, HeyTell was publicly launched with very little fanfare. 33 intrepid users downloaded HeyTell its first day in the App Store.

One year later, with HeyTell exceeding 3.5 million downloads, HeyTell users are proving that there's a place in their hearts (and their work days, and their nights out) for quick, personal push-to-talk style voice messaging.

And for this, we thank you, each and every amazing HeyTell user — you are truly what has propelled HeyTell's growth and acceptance as a vital communication tool for daily use. Your passionate sharing of the app with friends, family, and co-workers makes inroads each and every day in pushing forward the idea of quick voice messaging as a highly effective and personal mode of communication...not to mention minimizing the number of sore fingers and misunderstood text messages out there!

We're also really happy to report that it's possible to bootstrap a product and have millions of people use it in just a year. It's surely not easy; we absolutely owe a debt of gratitude to our family, friends, and advisors, ubiquitous Internet and mobile broadband, cloud-based hosting like Amazon Web Services, and distribution channels like the App Store and Android Market. We believe this entire endeavor would have been nearly impossible to pull off just a few years ago.

So what have we been up to lately? We recently released a brand new backend architecture that should scale to handle our anticipated growth through and beyond the next year and are hard at work on improved clients for iOS and Android. We're also looking towards additional platform support and expanded localization support as part of our efforts to grow internationally. In addition, we hope to have some fun announcements for you in the coming weeks!

And, because no 1st birthday should pass without a 'baby book' of sorts, we give you HeyTell's 12 month usage statistics:

HeyTell reached over 10,000 people by the end of February 2010. HeyTell hit the 1 million user mark in October, 2 million by early December, and 3 million in mid-January. Our biggest download day of 2010 was December 25.

December 25 was also a big day for the iPod 4G - we saw 5 times the number of new iPod registrations on December 25 than any other day of the month!

Registrations don't mean much, though, if people don't keep coming back. Around 450,000 people check in with HeyTell each day now. Each week, 1 million check in. Every month, we see around 2 million users sending, receiving, or checking their HeyTells.

So why do HeyTell users keep coming back? We believe it's because their friends and family keep coming back. Over 1.7 million messages are sent a day in 2011, and, over HeyTell's year of service, over 215 million messages have been sent:

If it were possible to play all audio transmitted via HeyTell end-to-end, it would take 44 years to play it all back!

So who's using what? Our figures show that roughly 25% of our users run Android operating systems, and 75% run iOS.

The Android audience is very diverse, there are 1114 different combinations of Android device and OS, compared to 35 iOS variations. The most popular Android phone among HeyTell users appears to be the HTC Evo; however, the most popular since December 2010 is the Samsung Galaxy S.

So, that's the HeyTell year in review—thanks to everyone who participated in HeyTell's Year One—we couldn't have done it without you! We hope you stick around and we look forward to another fantastic year ahead!