Snapvine makes a widget that lets you leave voice comments for friends and is one of the many competing online voicemail widgets. The service has also been used to connect celebrities and fans, similar to SayNow, which closed a $7.5 million series A at the end of August. There are many other voice messaging services out there that offer more utility, including Jangl and Jaxtr, which offer cheaper anonymous phone calls on top of voice messaging. Jangl has recently gotten access to millions of users as a widget on Tagged’s homepages and Jaxtr has over a million registered users. Snapvine reports that their application has been installed on five million user profiles across the various social networking sites.

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SayNow connects celebrities using a web based interface and phone messages. The service works both ways: celebrities can leave messages for their fans, and fans are able to leave messages for their favorite stars.

The pitch is simple: SayNow believes that voice is the “truest form of communication a fan can have with a celebrity.”

In practice, it’s a little like audio blogging. Celebrity messages tend to focus on what the star is currently doing, be that touring, recording etc in an informal manner.

The company’s technology is already being put to use by a broad range of well known record labels, including Zomba Label Group, RCA Music Group, Sony BMG Nashville, Universal Music Group (Def Jam Recordings, Island Records), EMI (Capitol Music Group), Hollywood Records, and TVT Records. Artists using SayNow include the Foo Fighters, Mario, Hurricane Chris, MIMS, Tila Tequila, Huey, T-Pain, Bobby Valentino, Papa Roach, Plain White T’s, The Rocket Summer, Kenny Chesney, and Chris Young.

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Of course this model could be applied to any one-to-many form of communication in a mobile enabled context where vocal intonation and ease of use are important. Though easy to use, SayNow is less simple than it might appear and is a possible acquisition target for a larger company interested in integrating voice recognition, SMS and a compelling consumer experience. I like the service as it stands though too and can imagine it being successful without being acquired. Good functionality, clear demand and viable business model.

The eight person team behind SayNow is based in Palo Alto and has gone through one undisclosed round of funding.

SayNow is billed as a more personal way to communicate with your fan base, voice being more personal than text, while still protecting privacy by mediating between two sides of a phone number exchange. Though the system is still in private beta, beta testers and my own initial exploration of the system make it clear that SayNow has been put together very professionally. For such a seemingly lightweight use, this is an application that’s had some time invested in its development.

Voice recognition and an ajax web interface that responds to your phone activity give the system a great feel. To see a SayNow MySpace widget in action, check out featured artist AM Kidd’s MySpace page. Among the featured artists using SayNow are several with tens of thousands of friends on their MySpace acount. I think this is service is going to be met with a definite demand in the social media market. It’s not a cool technology looking for a market.

The long term revenue model appears to be wrapping phone messages in advertising; something I expect will be quite viable if the service catches on. I don’t think that people will mind hearing a company name and one line of advertising before or after their message – in exchange for communicating with an admired musician.

Before I used SayNow to send a few messages, I wasn’t excited by the idea. After trying it out, taking a look at the team behind it and thinking about the business model, though – I’m convinced that this is a startup that could go somewhere.

Thanks to Noah Kagan for pointing us to this one.