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VoIP news roundup

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Some interesting VoIP-related news I read this week:

TAC to FCC: Set a Date Certain for the End of the PSTN – and the proposed year is 2018. The big concern seems to be maintenance of infrastructure when traditional landline subscribers are dropping off rapidly. I think that infrastructure still has a lot of value to it, but not necessarily for traditional telephone service. What could the utilities or private enterprise do with a copper grid and switching infrastructure that reaches even the most rural parts of the United States?

From the VoIP and Gadgets blog: How Skype Works With Facebook – an interesting interview about how Skype put their technology in the web browser for Facebook video chat. It’s basically the Skype client condensed down to a browser plugin.

Meanwhile, Google is doing it their own way with XMPP: Announcing Google+ Hangouts – Google keeps working at the XMPP extensions to make the protocol media-rich, and now they have group video chat. I don’t have a Google+ account and haven’t tried it out yet.

Google’s offering is standards-based: “To support Hangouts, we built an all-new standards-based cloud video conferencing platform.” And those standards are “XMPP, Jingle, RTP, ICE, STUN, SRTP” and “HTTPS + SRTP”. Some folks would say that it’s not “standards-based” unless SIP is doing the signaling. I think the only thing standard means today is that your work is published for others to use and some technical group of people reviews it. XMPP has that. SIP’s technical body is the IETF and H.323’s technical body is the ITU. Who’s more standard?

The standard with the most implementations wins (Betamax, anyone?) and Google has the weight to tip the end-user-connectivity scales toward XMPP/Jingle. SIP is firmly in place as the current IP trunking standard but might soon be falling behind when it comes to connecting the end-users.

Facebook VoIPness

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it crash to the earth, does it make a sound?

If a person exists in real life, yet does not have a Facebook profile, does he really exist?

My first year on Facebook was mostly spent ignoring it. And then came the news feed. That made it a little more worth my time to check on it from time to time. Now we have applications, and so Facebook has become a true work/play “platform.”

I’m sure there’s a lot to write about the Facebook Platform, but this isn’t a software blog, it’s a VoIP blog, so let’s talk about VoIP. I’ve been keeping an eye on the telephony applications appearing on Facebook.

Applications I use:

GrandCentral: dead simple but useful. Adds a CallMe button to your profile. This works as a Facebook integration because the button is personalized to the profile on which it sits. I’m looking at Bill’s profile and want to call him. Click the button. (VoIP because GrandCentral is VoIP on the backend. Visit GrandCentral.com to find out what this is, if you haven’t heard of it, and e-mail me if you want to be invited.)

Free Conference Calls by iotum: it’s a standard conference bridge. But the cool part is how you invite people to a scheduled conference call. It works just like the Facebook Events application and therefore is familiar to Facebook users. You can also invite external people by e-mail. During the call, participants can hang out on the Facebook page to see who’s in the call (highlighted green) and who is not (red), updated realtime, and review the agenda. According to iotum’s Alec Saunders, they’re planning to include a wall component to allow notes to be added in realtime, as well as recording.

Updated 10/2/07: Today Iotum has added two new, useful features to the Facebook Free Conference Calls application. From the application page, you (the call organizer) can mute or unmute participants. Participants can also indicate that they wish to speak by virtually raising a hand.

Haven’t yet tried but might:

Voicemail by FWD: a good idea, but I think I’d rather have people call via the GrandCentral button and leave voicemail for me in my common voicemail box.

Applications I won’t bother with: anything that just puts a link in my profile or applications menu to an external web site or program. What’s the point? There’s no real Facebook integration there.

What I’m really waiting for is a slick Adobe Flash embedded application that truly lets me “click-to-call.”