Jangl marries email to the phone
Jangl rolled out a pretty intriguing new service today. The pitch? They claim to have assigned a phone number to every email address on the internet. Go to Jangl's home page, and enter the email address of someone you know, and it connects you… on the phone of your choice. Publish your unique jangl URL (mine is http://callme.jangl.com/alecs@exmsft.com), and anyone will be able to call you… all without you revealing your true phone number. You can even embed the whole thing in a graphical widget if you like…. as below.
So am I excited? Well, it works based on not just who you are, but also who the people are trying to reach you. It's a New Presence application… discerning your communications intents based on the identity of the person trying to reach you and your preferences. The really cool thing? It's not a new identity scheme… it's just leveraging the identity you already have in your email address.
Jangl announced masses of other new features today too, but by far the most interesting was the marriage of email address and phone number.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:03 pm
i thought you might appreciate this one alec;) Thanks for taking a look.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
[...] turn off, smacking of a start-up over hyping itself. I almost passed on this, up until I read this post by Alec Saunders, and started thinking about the longer implications of what Jangl [...]
May 24th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
A graphical widget? Back in my day we used to call those images.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
I don’t get it - what problem does it solve. If someone sends me an email I have there contact info., and I can decide to either call them back or not, what benefit to me does this extra step add? Why do I care if they get my phone number?
May 29th, 2007 at 6:36 am
Jangl is the new Rebtel
More than as a new presence application or the Voice 2.0 White Pages I see the new Jangl as a competition to Rebtel, whithout its basic fee, or to Gizmo Call’s free local numbers. People are tweaking given services, like Jangl, for their own purposes…