A few short hours after my Twitter account had the new official Twitter image sharing service activated and I thought to myself "Bye, bye Twitpic", Twitpic go and launch their own online social media website called Heello which looks, feels and behaves just like, well.. Twitter.

Heello consists of short, 140 character public updates, called 'pings', which can include photos and videos. It has a stream of public updates. It has replies, 'echoes' (retweets by another name), private messages, '@' usernames. It is very, very like Twitter. In fact, the only differentiating feature I have found so far is group private messaging.

Heello, being only a few hours old as I write this post, lacks many of the rich features of Twitter, such as hashtags, geotagging, an API, a mobile website, iOS/Android apps, etc., but these are all apparently in the pipeline.

Needless to say, I have signed up and have found it strangely fascinating. I can't quite put my finger on why. It is, for all intents and purpose, a Twitter clone and I find it quite inexplicable why Twitpic have launched Heello into an area already dominated by Twitter. Is it a direct response to Twitter rolling out their own image sharing service? Is Heello a grand folly or a masterstroke? Only time will tell. At present the tweet is still mightier than the ping, but who knows how that might change..