Interestingly, there was no event inside of Facebook for the ACUTA annual conference that I referenced in my last post.  Continuing my ongoing exploration of Facebook, I thought that perhaps because ACUTA is the "Association for Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education" there might be an "event" already created in Facebook.  There wasn't one, so naturally I created an event notice.  If you are going to the ACUTA conference this month and are also a Facebook user please feel free to join that event.

ACUTA?

Creating this event caused two discussion threads in my brain.  The first was about ACUTA as an organization and the question of perhaps why there is no mention of ACUTA within a search inside Facebook.  While my co-workers involved with education sales have been involved with the organization for some time, I personally had not heard of it prior to being asked about speaking at this conference.  From the corporate FAQ (and university FAQ), it seems very obvious that ACUTA comes from the telecom side of the house and is looking now at the larger "communications technology" space.  I would think for the folks involved, all of these social networking services will play an increasingly larger role in the future.  One of the talks I'm interested to hear at the conference is "Millenials Go to College", which looks to be about how communication is changing with the younger generation.  Will ACUTA members be inspired to delve more into Facebook after that?  (Will the talk cover Facebook? One would expect so...) We'll see.

Facebook events and corporate choices?

The second discussion thread in my head was about how Facebook still needs to adjust to being more than a college/university place.  For instance, let's look at the choices I have when creating an event:

First choice... a party!  Woohoo!  But wait... there are even many individual types of parties!  (Do Facebook users actually schedule a "Night of Mayhem"?)

Next up is "Causes"... with a sub-type of "Fundraiser, Protest or Rally".  So where do you put a "conference"?  I thought perhaps "Education" might be a choice, but that gives me these choices very clearly targeted at higher education:

The answer would seem to be under the fourth choice of "Meetings":

where, sandwiched between "Club/Group Meeting" and "Dorm/House Meeting" there is... ta da... "Convention".

Now, I realize that Facebook came out of college/university roots and that certainly parties are a major focus with that age range, but as Facebook tries to capture more "business" users... or at least more "professionals", one wonders if over time they will re-write this a bit to adjust more to the type of events that people within the business world usually attend.  Or perhaps at least re-order the priorities a bit (or let you do so).

They may not be able to easily do so, though.  They really have different audiences to which they need to cater.  One group is looking for social events and the other for more business focused events.  It's also not entirely clear to me that "business users" would actually want to use Facebook as the calendar for their events.  But if you buy into the vision of Facebook as your end-all and be-all portal (I'm not there yet, personally, but I can see that as the vision of FB.), it makes sense to think some of those meetings might migrate here as well.

We'll see... the evolution of Facebook continues!

Although I could not earlier find many Facebook apps that I considered true "VoIP apps" that linked out to the PSTN or larger VoIP world, we are seeing more apps emerging.  Two notable new entrants:

1. VoIP User Presence by Dean Elwood

Dean's a friend who runs VoIPUser.org (and provides the SIP voicemail box for Blue Box comments) and he's been experimenting with the Facebook API.  This is the first of what he says will be a series of Facebook apps.  Dean says this one is "SIP meets Presence meets Google Maps" and provides this on the Facebook apps page for a description:

"This application shows within your profile if you have a SIP device currently logged into the VoIP User server and are available to take calls. The application page also shows a Google Maps mashup page showing your current location."

There is also a thread going on in the VoIPUser.org forums about the application with more info, screenshots, etc.  It will definitely be interesting to see what else Dean cooks up.

More feedback on this one once I have a chance to actually use it.

2. Skype Me by Nabil Naghdy

This one does the rather obvious and lets you see the Skype presence of your other Facebook friends (provided they have installed the application). With a tagline of "skype meet facebook.  facebook meet skype." the developer says on the FAQ:

"SkypeMe is a Facebook application that links with your Skype account and lets you make calls right from inside Facebook. You can see which friends are online, make calls, and even buy SkypeOut credit from Facebook."

It appears to work primarily by getting the web presence of each of your friends and making that available to you, which means, naturally, that you need to enable Skype web presence inside the options of your Skype client.

There's actually two parts to it.  On your public profile page visible to everyone else, there is a box like the image shown on the left that lets another Skype user initiate a call to you.  On the internal page inside of my Facebook account for the applications I have installed, there is a page with a screen like the graphic on the right that shows all the Facebook friends I have who have also installed the SkypeMe Facebook application.

This Facebook app was announced in the Skype Mashup public chat.  Actually, I think it was really the first I saw announced (but then again, I wasn't really watching the chat last week while I was off).

Speaking of the Skype mashup contest, it was officially announced last Friday.  It will be very interesting to see what developers come up with!

One of the things that continues to fascinate me is the "mashup culture" we are in today where the whole "Web 2.0" (ugh! how I dislike the term!) motif is that you can mix and mash output and input from various services to come up with new and interesting integrations.  Anybody who has at this point NOT seen some mashup with Google Maps should probably stop reading this post now.  (In fact, turn off your computer and just go outside... you obviously haven't been paying attention, anyway!)  The programmableweb site lists now over 2000 mashups.  There's a wiki of Twitter mashups.  Mashable.com reports daily on more and more services that are very often new remixes and combinations of existing services.  It's a crazy but intriguing world we're in right now.

Today Skype joined the fray with their "Mashup Contest" calling on developers to join in building mashups that use the Skype API.  The contest will run until September 12th when they are having a "Skype Developer Days" conference in Prague.  From their announcement:

Judges will be from across Skype, eBay and Paypal, plus external judges. The winner will be chosen and announced on Sep 12th in Prague based on the following criteria: innovation, usefulness, cool factor, usability and a dash of weirdness.

It will be very interesting to see what evolves.  Having been in the Skype public chat that started initially to talk about mashups with Twitter, I'm fairly sure that we'll see some integration with at the very least Twitter and Facebook.  (Will Skype be the first with a Facebook VoIP app?)

Should be fun, at least... I'm curious to see what people do that involves "a dash of weirdness"!  :-)

With the recent release of Facebook's "Platform" for applications (see here for more info and links), my first thought, naturally, was... so what VoIP apps are in there?  Given that Facebook is being used as a email/IM/messaging platform by so many, the linkage into voice seems logical.  Oddly, when I went to Facebook's "Application Directory" and searched (using the "Search Apps" box) on either "voip" or "voice" I wound up with no applications!  However, there clearly are some voice applications in there.  Through some browsing, I discovered these (note that the first links on each line will only work if you are logged into Facebook):

• WalkieTalkie - private voice chat for a Facebook group.  If everyone in the group installs it, they can all participate in a group "conference call".
• Tag - from the same developer as WalkieTalkie, this is for one-to-one voice chat and leaving messages.
• Chatterbox - lets other users leave a voice message on your Facebook profile.
• VoicePlayer from Snapvine - let's users leave voice comments on your Facebook profile
• Msg-Time - same idea... you can leave voice messages
• Free World Phone from Jaxtr - call-back service that calls users on their existing phones... also includes voice messaging and ability to keep your phone number

There is also an app listed for Jangl that doesn't seem to be available if you click on the link.  But again, this is another call-back service that lets you keep your number private and use your existing phone.

All of these are interesting in various different ways, especially to me the WalkieTalkie and Tag apps as they would appear to be actual VoIP, but there does seem to be something missing here:

Where are the VoIP apps that go outside the Facebook walls?

Now, maybe I missed them (and feel free to leave me a comment telling me so), but it seems to me that it would be a logical thing to allow people to initiate voice conversations from within Facebook to various VoIP services, similar to what Xing is already doing with both Skype and also with regular phone numbers (through a conferencing service).   Skype is one obvious choice, but an app that did straight SIP (hmm... "Gizmo for Facebook") would be very interesting as well.  Or connected to one of the other IM services that include voice (Microsoft WLM, GoogleTalk, AIM, Yahoo!Voice)... or that played well with open source VoIP like Asterisk... or that connected to one of the enterprise VoIP or consumer VoIP services.

The question really is... who will be the first one to offer an app that lets you use your existing VoIP services from within the Facebook walls?  And through those services gives you PSTN connectivity?   We'll see...

(Hint: Given my next post, Skype's probably a good contender.)

I have not really written about Jaiku here at all... I have been meaning to explore it a bit more, but just haven't had the time.  What limited time I have had lately has been more focused on Twitter, Facebook, Skype and the evolving mashups of all of those.

But Ken Camp has been writing and advocating Jaiku, and is starting a series of posts with his one today: "Unveiling the new Jaiku Client for Nokia - Part 1"  Ken is going to talk more about the new client for Nokia S60 phones.  But this part of his first post is perhaps more revealing:

First, if you aren’t a Jaiku user today, you need to understand that Jaiku is what I call a lifestream aggregator. When you build your profile, you have complete control over what you wish to share of your lifestream of information. For many, that’s simply their Jaikus. Using this approach, a used can share brief snippets of information - current status, pose a question, leave a thought - for others to see.

Digging more deeply into Jaiku, we find you can also import RSS feeds of all flavors into your lifestream. For me, this means if you read my lifestream, you see blog posts from three different blogs, Flickr photos, blip.tv video posts, even Twitter posts. I’ll explain more about why I think this approach is revolutionary and exciting in a post tomorrow or Friday. It’s taken me a while as a Jaiku user to develop an appreciation for just why this is apprach to aggregation is really important. I think it’s positively revolutionary from a social networking perspective.

I agree with Ken that this type of "lifestream aggregation" represents a direction in which social networking is evolving.  The challenge, I think, really comes back to where you do that aggregation.  Jaiku would like to be your aggregator.  So would Twitter (which can bring in RSS feeds through sites like Twitterfeed.com).  And so indeed would Facebook which now includes an RSS application as part of its platform.

So which do you choose?

All are, to varying degrees, walled gardens of some sort.  Ken can't follow my status updates because I primarily use Twitter.  Alec Saunders does most all his updates within Facebook.   We do need to have some kind of common aggregator.   We need to tear down the walls so that we don't wind up in isolated islands of communication.

But in the meantime, if you want to read about how pretty and nice it is inside of the walled garden of Jaiku, head on over to Ken's post to read more.  This is Part 1, with the others to follow soon thereafter, I would expect.

For those who read my previous post about the ability to now post to Twitter from within Skype, Antoine "Ants" Bertout from Skype created a new Skype public chat to facilitate discussion around how Skype and Twitter could be integrated.  Anyone interested who has Skype 3.x is welcome to join by following the link below: 

Some of you reading this may be interested in the article on my Disruptive Conversations blog about a new service that lets you update Twitter from within Skype. 

The article itself is an example of the challenge I'm increasingly finding with some things falling into the "grey area" between my two main blogs.  This blog covers telephony, VoIP, etc., while Disruptive Conversations covers the "social media" of blogs, podcasts, etc.  The lines are pretty clear in some cases.

But the challenge is that the lines continue to blur.... communication that used to take place by phone is moving increasingly online and very often to "social networking sites" like Facebook, Twitter and friends... which I have primarily been discussing over on DisCon. Yet in the case of this post I just made, the integration was with Skype, a tool I normally discuss over here on Disruptive Telephony.  I wound up posting it over there... but I just as easily could have posted it here. 

I've toyed with cross-posting some articles into both places. It would be trivial to do since I use Windows Live Writer now for all my blogging.  The act of cross-posting is as simple as switching the weblog menu to a different weblog, updating the categories for the new blog and hitting "Publish".  But I've avoided that for a while primarily just to have one place for an article to live.  Am I being too much of a purist?  The blogs are designed with two different audiences in mind.  There may not be as much cross-over.  Or should I post in one and put a quick link like I did here in the other?

Thoughts?  Suggestions?

(Continuing my effort to flush my "queue of things I want to blog about"...)

Some time back, I stumbled upon this post "Top Ten: Most underrated VoIP Contributors".  Yeah, okay, so I liked the list because it had my employer on it, and mentioned the work Mitel has done with VOIPSA, which is really the activities that I do. So, yes, it's nice to be recognized and nice to hear the kind words about Mitel's contributions.  Some of the other people on the list were also interesting as well, so it was good to be introduced to others whom I haven't read.

Jon Arnold tagged me.  Of course, we really have to blame Luca for starting it and Jeff, phoneboy and others for pushing it along - and Moshe Maeir for adding the phone angle. I don't usually like to play the meme games... but it's Friday, it's lunchtime, I have a horrid cough and generally feel lousy... so I'll take a moment of distraction to blog my setup.  Plus, I get to talk about phones.  So here it is (click for larger view), and courtesy of 5 minutes in PowerPoint I've even numbered the phones.  What you are looking at is two computers with three screens.  The screen in the corner of the room is my rather old home desktop PC.  My (also older) laptop is then connected to the second monitor in the right foreground.  You can see pieces of my podcasting rig, although much of it is hidden by the laptop screen.  I write on either computer depending upon what time of day it is and which of the 5 or 6 different blogs I'm writing in. 

As to the phones, proving that VoIP teleworking can be secure (unlike what ComputerWorld.au thinks), most of the Mitel phones are hanging off of different teleworker servers back up at Mitel's office in Ottawa.  Why do I have so many phones?  Well, part of my job role is to test and experiment... so I'm always trying out new things - and from a security point-of-view, trying to break them.  So here goes the list:

1. Uniden cordless handset for household land line 
2. ancient Mitel 5020 that I started using as a secure teleworker set 4 years ago and never bothered to upgrade (see, we protect your investment ;-)... actually, the truth is I got a newer set to replace it and then decided to use that new set as a SIP set instead 
3. DUALphone for Skype calls (and yes, I could also use it for my land line) 
4. Mitel 5340 IP phone - connected as a secure teleworker set back to an IP-PBX in Ottawa... excellent phone, great acoustics, backlit 
5. Mitel 5220 IP phone (now replaced by the 5224) - running in SIP mode and connected to a local SIP proxy 
6. Mitel Navigator - perhaps the coolest phone I have... see the long silver bar under the monitor - that's the phone!  Handset is off to the right.  Connected as a secure teleworker back into Ottawa.

Plus I've generally got 1 or 2 softphones running on my laptop.   Using our "hot desking" support, I am usually logged in with my extension to either #4 or #6.  Often #6 because the Navigator has the excellent feature of acting as my PCs speakers and allowing me to have music playing in the background - and the music cuts out when a phone call comes in.  Very nice for someone working alone in a home office.

So now, who to tag:

• Alec Saunders 
• Martyn Davies 
• Irwin Lazar

With that, I think I've now down my blog meme playing for 2007....   off to get some cough medicine.

When I go to conferences, I usually wind up taking many shots of other people and events, but I naturally almost never wind up with any actual pictures of me. So it was a bit fun to find out that the photographer taking pictures for O'Reilly is posting all the pictures to a Flickr photo set, and that there were a couple of pictures of me included (click on the pictures to go to the Flickr pages and larger photos).  I was a bit amused to see that my mouth was wide open in both of them, but then again, I was in the middle of presenting so of course that would be the case.

I just have to say kudos to O'Reilly for doing the "Web 2.0" or "social media" thing of posting all these photos to Flickr... and tagging them all appropriately.  Given that they are a company that produces conferences like "Web 2.0", it rather makes sense that they would walk the talk, but it's just good to see.

Which of these two photos do you like the best?  I think I like the one on the left a bit better.  Many other good photos of the rest of the conference are part of the Flicker set.