KaKoo

Revenge is a dish best served cloned. Twitpic founder Noah Everett has unveiled Heello, his feature-for-feature copy of Twitter. The move comes just a day after Twitter completed the rollout of its photo-sharing service — a direct competitor to Twitpic.

Heello looks and acts like Twitter in almost every way. Instead of tweeting, users send “pings” to their followers. Instead of retweeting, users “echo” other posts. And instead of following, friends “listen” to their friends. The only real difference is that updates appear in a user’s stream in real-time, which is quite annoying if you want to click on something in a friend’s tweet.

And if that weren’t enough, Heello boasts Twitter and Facebook integration, so your Heello posts can still go to your other social networks. It also includes a real-time feed of all public activity, which currently contains a number of fake accounts claiming to be CNN, Tumblr and Mark Zuckerberg.

The clone seems more of a publicity stunt than a real business. Twitter blindsided Everett when it launched a feature that was directly competitive to his company, and this may be payback. Nevertheless, Everett told VentureBeat that Heello will soon support video, checkins, SMS integration, mobile apps and a “Channels” feature that works much like Twitter Lists.

Much as we love new social media services at Mashable, we’re not sure what to make of Heello. If Everett was looking for some attention, well, mission accomplished. But his service will have a tough time gaining traction against Twitter, and its 200 million registered users, without any truly innovative features.

Then again, if there’s one skill entrepreneurs have, it’s the ability to charge ahead with blind optimism, even when the numbers are against you.

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What do you do when you’re the founder of a popular photo-sharing service? Tweet a picture of yourself getting arrested with it, of course.

Early Tuesday morning, TwitPic founder Noah Everett (who has 2.8 million followers) tweeted that he was getting arrested and was in the back of a cop car. To prove it, Everett the posted a picture in a separate tweet from the back of the cop car (shown above).

According to subsequent tweets (see updates below), his encounter with police stemmed from him being naked in public. We haven’t even been able to confirm if he even was arrested. If true though, Everett has taken oversharing to a whole new level. The speed at which this pic is spreading is another demonstration of the power of social media, though we’re not sure this is the type of picture we’d want to spread across the web.

Updates: Two follow-up tweets from Everett:

“…I guess you can’t walk down your own street half naked…who knew – I got a free ride home by the nice police officer”

“…by half naked, I mean naked”

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Noah Everett, founder of the successful Twitter image-sharing service Twitpic, is letting the world know about his new venture, Heello (pronounced hee-low). The young programmer's second major foray into tech startups, the service has the broad goal of "making communication easier."In a blog post today, Everett said he got the idea for Heello two years ago, but he was deliberately vague on exactly what the products will be. He did write, "Many of these products were conceived to solve issues I encountered while running Twitpic."In an email to us, he elaborated, "We're going to try and solve our issues (or the issues we've had with communication on various media) with the hopes that others are having those same issues, in the end at least we'll have a product that we can use."He also said the products will eventually involve text, voice, visual and other media, but will begin with web-based services.Other aspects of Heello will include a suite of internal tools for customer service, human resources and technology as well as a nonprofit wing that will allow Everett and others involved to "give back to the community and to the world." On that late score, Everett told Mashable, "We're not set up to be a homeless shelter, orphanage, or a food bank BUT we are good at technology and that's how we want to help other non-profits throughout the world."We've contacted Everett for more details about how Heello will work and what value it will provide in an already crowded market of communication apps and tools; we'll update this post when we hear back from him.Twitpic has continued to add new features (including Events, Places and Face Tagging) over the past few months, and its growth has remained steady this year. Back in January, Everett revealed that the site turned down an acquisition offer of more than $10 million."Twitpic is still going strong," he confirmed to us. "We've learned how to scale and have added on most of the main features I've wanted to see, so that will allow our team to devote time to Heello. But Twitpic is still very high priority. We're working to grow our team a lot so we can handle all the projects we've got planned."Twitpic was notably bootstrapped and solely built by Everett, though it has recently added a number of employees. We're hearing that Heello will be bootstrapped for now as well; Everett said, "I like maintaining control of every aspect of the company." But we can imagine that a few angels and VCs are quite interested in what Everettt is working on next.Everett concluded that he intends to make Heello a long-term project, not just a quick, social media cash cow. "I’m here with Heello for the long haul," he wrote. "The goal of Heello is not an exit strategy of being bought out but to build a lasting company that solves real problems, from communication issues to human needs."

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