Disruptive Telephony

It's very cool to see that one of the leading web sites about "mashups", ProgrammableWeb.com, has announced the launch of a new section focused on "Mobile/Telephony" mashups.  They actually call it a "Market", and there are two others launched today: Mapping and Shopping. 

The obvious focus for this blog, though, is the "Mobile/Telephony" market. The announcement notes that there are currently over 25 different APIs under "Telephony" or "Messaging" and in the actual lists of mashups, 104 are tagged "mobile" and 113 tagged "messaging".  The announcement also notes that Thomas Howe will be assisting with the content of this new section. (Congrats to Thomas!)

The list of telephony APIs (only 11, the other 14+ must be "messaging) is available and several names are probably quite familiar.  Thomas Howe also wrote a piece to explain the different types of APIs and provide a bit of background:  "Telephony & Mobile APIs and Mashups, the Big Picture".

I did find it a bit puzzling that the list of telephony APIs didn't include Skype, given that Skype has a whole developer website set up to support its APIs.  Likewise no mention of Asterisk even though the entire thing is really one big set of APIs.  But hey, the section is only a day old, so we'll have to give them a bit to see how it develops.

The fun thing about the state of VoIP/IP telephony right now is that it really is becoming all about APIs and mashups...  voice is truly just another form of data on the network... and once it is just a bunch of packets you can do really fun stuff with it!  Kudos to the ProgrammeableWeb team and Thomas Howe for helping point the way to some of the interesting stuff people are doing in this area.

Definitely do check out their telephony mashup site.