Disruptive Telephony

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!

Wow!  As I've been scanning my email and notes from the last week, it seems like it was quite a heck of a week to take off!  Lots going on... and much to write about.  We'll see  how much writing I get done.  As mentioned previously, I'm now at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas for "Mitel Forum", our annual event for solution providers, consultants, the Mitel User Group and analysts.  Should be a very good - and involved - event!

Don't expect to see much from me here for the next bit.  In a few minutes I'm shutting down my systems and heading offline on vacation for the next week.  I'll be back online Monday, June 25th, although I'll be travelling to a Mitel conference in Las Vegas for most of that week.

We're not planning to go anywhere extravagent... maybe some day trips around Vermont... some camping... work around the house... all in all just a pleasant way to spend some time before the heat of summer hits.

See you in a week!

FYI, while I don't usually write a whole lot about Mitel here, I do in fact work for Mitel and after I return from a week of vacation I'll be heading down to Las Vegas on Monday, June 25th, to speak at our Mitel Forum event for resellers, consultants and analysts.  If any of you who read this weblog will be down there, I'll look forward to seeing you there (and please say hello).  You'll find me giving presentations on... gee.... "VoIP Security" and "Business Continuity"!  (Surprise, surprise...)  Should be a very good event.

Ever wonder why I wound up in Burlington, VT, after living in Ottawa, Ontario, for most of 5 years?  Well, maybe you haven't... but that and other items about me are now available in an interview that Martyn Davies has posted as part of his new "Bending the Needle" podcast series.  When Martyn was over here and visited me back in the winter, he recorded this brief interview sitting in my home studio.  He just recorded it on his handy little Zoom H4 portable recorder which worked quite well.  He also took this picture to the right, which remains among my favorite as far as pictures of me go.

Martyn had told me that he was teaming up with Dean Elwood from VoIPuser.org to do a podcast series and this "Bending the Needle" seems to be their work.  The subtitle is "Interviews with the Leading Edge Personalities in the VoIP Space" and so it's an honor to be among the first interviewees he has up there.  I'll subscribe and will be interested to see their other interviews.

Over at Skype Journal, Jim Courtney continues his exploration of the IM+ client that allows you to use Skype on the Blackberry.  As I mentioned yesterday, one of my main questions is - where is the PC making the conference call?   As Jim noted, he called me today using the client and I snapped the screenshot he uses in his post.  You can see in the image on the right that we are in a conference call.  The call is hosted by Jim's Skype client and then brings in his mobile phone and then my Skype account.

But where is that version of Skype running as Jim?  It's not on his PC.  It's not on his Blackberry.

So where is it?

Now, the IM+ client has Jim's username and password... and so I am guessing there must be a server back at Shape Services, the maker of IM+, that is running instances of Skype for each person using it.  Is that how they do it?  I would wonder how easily it would scale if this is, in fact, the case.

This all is a concern to me because it does come down to a matter of trust.  Where is that PC that is hosting the system?  How much of my info are they seeing?  If they can login as me (since I've given them my username and password) they can see all my contacts and, on a normal Skype client, all my chats as well, plus my voicemail, call logs, etc.  As the person commenting on my article yesterday noted, someone with my username/password may also have access to my PayPal account... which could ultimately lead to my bank account.  So who and where is it?

Methinks perhaps I need to go and explore the IM+ Terms of Service in finer detail...

Ever since Skype first launched, they have really been one of the showcases for Global IP Solutions' (GIPS - formerly "Global IP Sound") codecs, particularly the wideband iSAC codec which you could argue is largely what has accounted for the great audio quality you can often get on Skype calls.  Now, of course GIPS has many other customers - in fact their customer/partner list reads like a veritable "Who's Who" of companies within the VoIP industry.  Skype, though, has always been one of the great examples to point to.

It would seem, though, that Skype and GIPS have had a parting of the ways.  Back in March, there was discussion of new codecs in the Skype 3.2 beta and the possibility that this was as a result of an acquisition Skype had made.  Yesterday, though, there was a post to the main Skype blog that included this (my emphasis in bold):

And because we’ve replaced our audio engine in our most recent releases — it’s now fully built in-house — it’s worth bearing in mind that you may run into some bumps when a call is placed from an older version of Skype to newer versions.

So "it's now fully built in-house", eh?  That would seem to pretty clearly confirm that the GIPS engine is no longer inside of Skype.  We can speculate as to why... did the contract with GIPS come up for renewal and GIPS wanted more $$$?  Did Skype just want more control?  Politics?  Personalities?  Some other reason?

In any event, it will be interesting to see Skype's evolution as they work out the issues of the migration, particularly because there are undoubtedly a great number of people out there running an older version who have no clue that they should upgrade.  (Earlier versions had no notification that a new version was available.)

Since I've been writing about botnets (here and here), I just had to mention that the FBI announced yesterday some arrests of botherders as part of "Operation Bot Roast" (what a great name, eh?).  More coverage is available on ZDNet's Government blog and also the Washington Post's Security Fix blog.  It's interesting (but not surprising) to note that one of the three arrests is of Robert Soloway, the "spam king" currently in jail awaiting trial related to sending spam.  The botnet saga continues...

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.)