In practice, you open your contact list, and you can decide whether you want to call that contact, send him/her an SMS or drop him/her a private tweet. It makes sense, especially for heavy social networking users who are used to communicating on Facebook or Twitter on a daily basis. Or, as Pinger CEO Greg Woock puts it, “If people under 25 designed mobile phones, they’d put IM and social network messaging alongside dialing, texting and e-mail.”
Other features include a horizontal keyboard mode for instant messaging - a feature that's missing from iPhone's SMS capabilities for some reason - and free texting to US mobile phones, which Pinger does by sending IMs over the iPhone's data connection instead of sending a regular SMS.
Pinger also supports MySpace, and they plan to extend the platform support to BlackBerry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian in the future.
