Inside Facebook

Facebook users can now record voice messages and post them on the walls of friends through Voice Wall, a newly released service from Society.me. Users call a designated phone number, select a friend using a touch-tone system, and their voice message appears in a streaming audio player on the friend’s wall. Voice Wall equips Facebook with an intimate communication medium that could prove especially useful to mobile users without a smart phone or data plan.

Voice Wall offers functionality in exchange for a user’s mobile phone number, email address, and constant account access privileges through the Facebook Platform. One shortcoming of the service is that the wall posts contain bland, uninviting auto-populated text which users can’t alter.

Links on the wall posts feed back to Society.me’s core product, a question and answer site focused on quickly returning a large volume answers, sometimes at the sake of quality. They also provide a service called fb140, which lets you to quickly find and follow any of your Facebook friends who have Twitter accounts.

Voice Wall’s streamlined interface offers a warm, familiar way to interact with friends in addition to Facebook’s native text, photo, and video. It could facilitate sending very personal birthday messages, or allow users to recount a story with their own vocal inflection. It joins Facebook Text Messages and 0.facebook.com as a way for mobile users without reliable internet capabilities to interact with the site. While productivity-focused YouMail allows users to save, forward to email or post existing voicemail to their own wall, its complex web interface and lack of sharing options make Voice Wall more versatile when it comes to Facebook.