Suaramu.com: Record, Play and Share (Updated)

Networking in virtual world becomes an ordinary activity nowadays. People are infatuated with social networking sites, local and international. Sharing photos, text, status, and links becomes normal bordering to routine activities.

However, one website creates its own market by providing social network facility, only this one with voice, Suaramu.com. The service that passed second stage of INAICTA 2010 provides service that enables users to record their voice, play it, and then share it with their friends. Like other social networks, status (in form of voice) can be commented or listened to. 'Suara' means 'voice' in Indonesian language.

At the moment Suaramu.com is still in alpha version and needs invitation to try their facilities. I’ve my invitation so I was able to try some of the facilities.

What interests me first of all was their interesting and fun design. Richard Fang is listed as one of Suaramu.com’s UI designers. I can see several elements of his typical here in this site. Suaramu.com has three founders, Novi Trihendarta, Ervan Yudi Widyarto and Hafni Tri Setiadi and supported by other team of 10 people, including Richard.

After login, users will be shown three columns with the center part as main focus to publicize status (in form of voice) recordable up to 30 minutes 30 seconds (update below). There are 3 main menus on this center column namely Update Status, Library and Photo Speaking. A timeline of the latest status updates from users and their relations is also available; all appear in form for box to play sound.

You can add friends, comment at each other’s status, and visit other user’s account. There’s also notification for any activities related to your account, information on how many times your voice was heard to check your popularity or other user’s activities over your voice. Voice status upload process, listening to preview and uploading it is quite easy. To delete your status, just hover above the sound player box, you’ll see an “X” mark.

Other than recording and publishing voice, users can also add text (150 characters) in form of comments, which is quite strange for me because Suaramu’s focus is not on text, or on comments to be precise, but some sort of subject if we are sending an email, because its function is only to give short explanation from the voice status.

From their website’s explanation, Suaramu is a platform, they will provide (at least) 3 services: web app (Suaramu.com), Facebook app and mobile app. It will be a lot more interesting if they also release API and see their service development by other developers.

After trying their service for sometimes, even though I’m still not sure whether I will use it further or not, but I must admit that trying out their various facilities is quite fun. We can reply other user’s voice status with our own. Suaramu will also apply game mechanic element such as badge, appear on account’s right side page with interesting design. These various badge can give additional fun effect to their service.

Suaramu is still in alpha version so there are some bugs such as when I try to submit comment directly from other user’s status, the process was error, but it ran well while commenting on commenting special tab.

When trying this service I thought of some things. I think it will be interesting if later on Suaramu can direct its users to, not only updating their status, but also enhance their creativity by using voice, such as creating a certain event or channel like YouTube. This event program can be chosen from various forms of event and topics like music, news, play (radio play), talk show or comedy like the late Kang Ibing’s show. Suaramu can also work together with other service provider using voice technology such as Indonesia Bercerita or Teman Macet.

The next question is of course about monetizing. Koprol recently launched their business account facility, is it possible that Suaramu can approach brand owners to create Suaramu’s account and communicate or create special channel to communicate with their costumers, or perhaps Suaramu can create badge design, collaborating with brand owners.

Being alpha version, there will be more development or perhaps even changes to come, user’s feedback may be highly welcomed. On the other hand, looking at Suaramu list of team, they look well covered. Their parts in developing startups were separated differently, although I can’t find Marketing division.

Let us wait and see what developments will Suaramu.com have. If you want to try their service you can go visit their link here, before they are running out their invitations for you to try out their alpha version.

Update: There’s a mistake in this article regarding time limit for uploading voice. It is supposed to be 30 seconds, not 30 minutes. It was concluded from time limit showed up when updating voice status.

As written by Hedaru on our Indonesia edition, Suaramu.com’s service actually reminds us of a similar service called Soundcloud, and I agree that there are some elements that remind me to it (the logo), although it is not exactly like it, the same goes to ‘header rainbow line’ design that is similar with Gowalla.

Translated by Nita Sellya.