When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems – which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program.

But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally – let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”

Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message – “Just left you a VM, it’s important” – just so you know it’s there.

There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.

The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag Yap and Jott, for example).

More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).

For now most people don’t have voicemail transcription services. So think before you voicemail, more and more people just find it annoying.

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The DEMO conference is wrapping up here in San Diego and unlike when it began 16 years ago the conference wasn’t dominated by mobile launches. None the less, there were some very interesting mobile services here like ScanR and Realeyes3D image scanning by mobile photo, Flurry’s simple email and RSS on Java phones and Grand Central (which I’ve written about at length).

3Jam and Pinger both launched multiperson SMS services at DEMO. Probably first popularized by Dodgeball, multiperson SMS is a feature (or a company – your call!) that quite a few people are coming out with all at once lately. The following are some short descriptions of eight companies offering multiperson SMS and a table displaying which services offer particular features.

The List

• Jyngle is a web based service that has voice support, just launched and got a review over on CrunchGear today.
• 3Jam is funded, relatively straight forward and launched here at DEMO.
• Pinger lets users quickly respond to messages by voice and received $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in 2005.
• Swarmteams does a whole lot of things, though we weren’t able to get it to work well in testing for our original review. You might have better luck, and if so then this Irish service could well be worth using.
• Loopt is a location aware service funded by YCombinator and Sequoia. We reviewed it at launch.
• Dodgeball is old school and was acquired by Google in 2005.
• Twitter is for groups of friends who want varying levels of instant, automatic updates on each others’ activities. It’s a product of podcasting company Odeo.
• Moblabber is a mobile social network that users can receive topical messages from automatically.

There are undoubtedly more companies that offer multi-person SMS, or at least there will be by the time I click publish on this post – but I hope that comparing these seven company’s by feature set will help flesh out a vision of the landscape and where we stand today.

The Features

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This is a serious company with a dead simple, viral product in the mobile voice messaging space. Pinger, which was called Project Edgar at the time, raised $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in November 2005, and Kleiner partner Randy Komisar joined the board of directors.

The founders both came out of Handspring (Greg was VP Sales and Joe was VP Marketing) and also worked together at Virgin on a project that never launched.

There’s not much we can say yet about the product, but I will say that this is one of the few mobile applications that I’ve seen that I’ll use every day. And the private beta is more buttoned up than most non-beta services we’ve tested. More on this as soon as the company gives the green light. Sign up to be notified of launch on the Pinger home page.