Hahlo.com beta opens soon

10 days ago I launched my prototype iPhone ‘app’. Honestly I didn’t think there would be any interest in it, and I just did it as a little bit of self amusement. I may have been wrong. It got dugg and received over 15,000 visits in two days….which including several visits from actual iPhones….which is very interesting.

For those of you that may not know what I’m even talking about, I’m referring to my Twitter ‘app’ for the iPhone. Initially I was going to call it simple iTweetr, but that changed when I discovered a couple of days later that there was actually already an application call Tweetr, which was just to similar.  I decided a new name was needed, and I settled on something a little more generic. Why? Because my grand plans for hahlo stretch beyond just Twitter…

What is hahlo? Putting it simply, it is (for the moment) just an interface for the great twitter service, but styled to work well on the iPhone. That said however, there is nothing to stop you using hahlo in your regular browser, there is nothing that will prevent that (well, maybe Internet Explorer, but…).

Right now you can signup for the beta which will be beginning in the next couple of days. I haven’t finished everything off yet, but there is enough for people to start testing. So far I’ve got the following crossed off my list:

  • public timeline
  • friends timeline
  • user timeline
  • view replies (requires logon)
  • view direct messages (requires logon)

The big goal for the next couple of days is to get the update functionality working, because a twitter app isn’t much without the ability to actually update your tweets. Then there are also the fancy urls which I have to sort out as well as organising the menus, icons layouts etc. All in all theres quite a bit to do by next Friday.

Yes I want to have a working, usable version ready to roll on the 29th for the iPhone launch. After the 29th its your feedback that will be very useful to me. Since I live in Australia, and we’re not expecting the iPhone until something next year, I’m not going to be able to test it first hand on the device itself.

If you’re interested (…and why wouldn’t you be) then scoot over to hahlo.com and signup for more information about the beta. Any and all feedback is welcome, if you have something in particular you would like hahlo to be able to do, or even if theres something you would rather it didn’t do, I’d love to hear it.