"Oyez oyez oyez! I do on this day, the 9th July 2007, announce the birth of a mash-up web application, hereby named Tell'M. God save the Queen."
The traditional holler of the town crier may be largely ceremonial these days, but people still have a desire to announce their news to the world - not just to the handful of friends or family reachable by text message.
The resourceful minds at the BT Beta team, inspired by social blogging service Twitter, decided they could fill this gap in the market, and in just a few weeks have come up with the literally named Tell'M service.
This simple yet powerful application allows you to send a message to anyone viewing the website (www.bt.com/beta) in a matter of moments - you just select your location in the world, enter your message and then announce it. You can also enjoy the rolling announcements from people across the planet that pop up on the constantly shifting map, as well as comments made in response. Users can now even add a picture to make their Tell’M more interesting, informative or simply so that it stands out.
Tony Pett, head of the Beta team, said: "Rather than do lots of theoretical research before launching Tell'M, we decided to put it live as soon as possible and let users help us to develop this into something they like. Of course, we might also learn that they don't really understand it, or have a need for it, but we will have learnt this very quickly and with an absolute minimal investment - we aim to succeed or fail fast."
He added: "If Tell'M takes off we could monetise it relatively easily with advertising or micro-payments - for example, linking advertising sales to birth announcements. Equally we are just as keen to help attract more people to BT.com. Users can suggest new ideas such as Tell’M, and use other self-service applications we develop."
Tell'M is a web ‘mash-up', a hybrid combining more than one application or sources of content to create a new, integrated experience. In this case, the foundation is the Google Maps service, which allows you to quickly find your way around the world in great detail using place names, post codes or simply scrolling. Google Maps has been combined with a Java-based application written by the Beta team in less than a week of total man hours, partly from using existing software components.
Tom D'Roza, one of the principal developers of Tell'M, said: "We started out trying to develop a service where new parents could announce births, but we have lots of ideas for additional features and possibilities for Tell’M. It could be available in hospitals and we are looking at the option of using it for announcing community events, for example, and perhaps also linking it with SatNav to help people find them."
He added: "This is something you would not necessarily expect from BT, but we want to be at the forefront of web 2.0 development, fostering the same kind of innovation you see from Google."
The site content can be displayed on other websites via an RSS feed. D'Roza said that Tell'M can be opened up for other websites to write directly to the service. The team also welcomes feedback via e-mail or the online discussion forums, which helps them to make changes or add new features quickly if users have suggestions.
The team has the bandwidth to come up with clever ideas that might prove valuable to BT on top of their existing workload in the same spirit as Google's '20 per cent time', where developers are allowed to spend one day a week on a project of their choice.
In this case one small creative spark has led to the launch of Tell’M. With its tagline of "announce it to the world", it also lets the world know that there is a new generation of innovation coming out of BT.