Chirp iPhone app introduces sharing via sound
You'd be forgiven for thinking this is a story about some sort of jukebox from my House (of Crackpot Theories), but this is news about a real app called Chirp.
What's Chirp? "Half Bump, half Soundhound." On your iPhone, you choose an item (photo, note, or link) and then you can share with everyone around you who also has the app. It plays a high pitched series of tones, which other phones nearby (also running Chirp) listen for; the tones convey the URL to the item uploaded, and the other phones download it. (The app does require data access to work, so it's not true peer-to-peer sharing, but it's good enough.)
I loaded it today, and since the TUAW staff doesn't all report to one big office, I was sitting here by myself wondering how to test it. Luckily the Chirp Blog has a couple of test items you can use to try it out, and I have to admit, it's pretty slick.
Something I hadn't thought about when I first downloaded the app was doing something with audio on a website or in some other fashion, like an audio QR code. At first that sounded kind of cool, considering all the useful kinds of things to be done with something like that. Then I thought about hearing the same brief tone many many times a day and I think that would get old in a hurry.
As of now it appears to be just the Chirp app that uses this technology, but for a quick way to share files it looks reasonably handy.
[hat tip The Next Web]
