Twitter clone Heello: a parallel universe for Twitter fakesters

Heello looks like a minimalist copycat of early Twitter, and was created by Twitpic founder Noah Everett. At the time of this blog post, some of the more entertaining fake accounts have already been taken down, but earlier today, "Heello CEO" Evan Williams (he's not) was giving away free iPads to Heello users. I wish them well when Twitter's attorneys come a-knockin' to tell them "Heellno." (via Laughing Squid and Waxy)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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http://twitter.com/martchand Martain Chandler

“HELL.. …OH” ? ”HEEL.. …OH” ? ”HE… …ELLOW”? helo? How do you say it?
TaymonBeal

What’s the point of this? Are they just copying Twitter as a joke, or is this for accounts that Twitter won’t take, or what?
- mat catastrophe
  
  A recent ping there indicates they are working to take down fake accounts. Hmm, wonder if they’re hiring?
http://sterlinganderson.net Sterling Anderson

I remember going to RailsConf I think 2007 and Twitter was the Rails darling. It was the first Rails app to really start getting attention. Rails evangelists loved to use Twitter as an example of how you could build an app simply and quickly, and it could scale. At the time the argument went that if the app was bogging down just thrown more hardware at the problem, hardware is cheap. Even back then when Twitter was really a baby they could not scale. They suffered from downtime constantly. At the conference the people who knew what they were doing really gave it to Twitter during their talk.

Five years later I still do not understand why some other startup has not been able to come out with a service that copies Twitter, with maybe a few added features, not much, just a couple, to woo users away. Of course their big selling point would be up time. If they can avoid having as many issues as Twitter still has today they would be golden.
- xunker
  
  Saying “Rails doesn’t scale” is like saying “my car doesn’t go infinitely fast”:
  
  http://teddziuba.com/2008/04/im-going-to-scale-my-foot-up-y.html
  
  Short version: don’t take opinions about “scaling” from people who have never “scaled” something.
http://twitter.com/joshpincus joshpincus

I just joined!
erissian

This is likely a reaction to Twitter starting its own image service.
http://twitter.com/mburchett Mike Burchett

Ummm, what is the point? It looks like a crappier version of Twitter with less people. This isn’t a rival, its a knock off.

It looks like it was sold from the inside of some guy’s jacket next to the Bolex watches.
mat catastrophe

Heh. I just signed up for a twitter account 2 or 3 days ago. So, now I’ve got one of these.

Why not?
Jeddy Khan

social networking is becoming increasingly complicated. If I add all the people on Twitter and Facebook – what do I have? Exactly the same whom I am already in contact with, thus making the exercise worthless. Google+ will want me to add the same friends. Exactly the same people from all the other social networking websites. The best one would be if I could add people at random whom I do not know add as many people I like, without being warned like Facebook does and blocks me for two weeks or more. On Facebook making too many friends is a crime. I don’t know about other social networking sites.
- http://About.me/StbxYou Stb Hernández
  
  Eeerrrm, Google plus already offer that… someone not invited yet?