« Back to Baseball: Mets contender in NL East Wildcard Race |
Main
| The BellsterfwdOUT Network: Alive and Well »
August 06, 2005
My Summer Project: Working on the Relaunch of Free World Dialup
Earlier this year I started working on the redesign of the Free World Dialup website which quickly became a project for the Summer of 2005.
While I still hold out hope of launching the new website before the commencement of Fall 2005 VON, we still have a lot of work to get done over the next six weeks in order to be ready for the re-launch.
The approach I decided to take was to be pretty up front with what FWD is and what it isn't and our working tag line is: "Communication for Geeks by Geeks." I ended up taking that path mostly because we are not a "consumer friendly service" and that our best new user is someone who also shares "a passion for communications" and has the patience to work out local networking issues and/or other high-tech communication challenges.
Since the launch of Free World Dialup in November, 2002 we have given out over 500,000 accounts to people in 179 countries around the world and our on-line user community continues to grow, albeit a lot slower than Skype but yet faster than many others. To date we have over 135 peering relationships in place with VoIP service providers around the world and each week our peering relationships continue to grow.
In parallel with the relaunch of the FWD website, we are also working on the next version of pulver.Communicator.
Posted by jeff on August 6, 2005 04:16 PM | Permalink
Additional resources: #140conf events | Watch the Jeff Pulver Show | Jeff's Qik Videos
Comments
"Communication for Geeks by Geeks" is to strongly worded. FWD in combination with the pulver.Communicator is quite useable even for non geeks, although maybe not for very very inexperienced users.
Posted by: Durden at August 9, 2005 05:04 AM
I wish to know if FWD supports call recording , answering machines etc.
Posted by: timmu at August 8, 2005 10:17 PM
"Communication for Geeks by Geeks" - OK, provided you make it explicitly known to all first-time visitors to the FWD website. Otherwise the non-geeks will later feel disappointed, and FWD will become the object of their critique.
Posted by: Ludwik at August 7, 2005 02:14 AM
Skype has two advantages over FWD. One is it's simple, any "idiot" or "dummy" can understand or install it. The other is that it has an API (application program interface). This allows me to connect a device to my computer running Skype in my basement to a phone line upstairs.
IMHO you should consider providing the Skype API as
an option to Pulver communitcator. It would allow people to use many of the inovative Skype devices
with FWD.
As a "geek" I use Skype because people who call me use it. That does not mean I really trust it.
Posted by: Geoffrey S. Mendelson at August 6, 2005 05:44 PM
I hope you folks make it W3C standards based, with no obligations for having a Flash plugin, and in general, useable :) Looking forward to it, as a web designer and as a user.
Posted by: Henrik Pauli at August 6, 2005 05:37 PM