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January 02, 2008

2008: The Year VoIP IS Disruptive (Again)

I have been thinking about the future of social communications for awhile.

Just for clarity, in my book, social communications = social media + Internet Communications.

As I mentioned during my Fall 2007 VON keynote back October, (see video - parts 1 and 2), I believe VoIP is the "special sauce", the catalyst that when mixed with social media will empower a new generation of people to communicate freely, specifically, without the need of phone companies.

I urge my friends in the VoIP Industry to rediscover that on the internet, voice is just an application. Please treat it as such.

Back in 1995, “Internet Telephony” received the immediate attention of mainstream business press because of the inherent disruptive powers Internet Telephony enabled. (In 1995, the term “VoIP” was not yet popular.)

In 2008, I look forward to the re-awakening of the VoIP / IP Communications industry and a shifting away from being just a core enabler of underlying technologies to the Telcos and Cable companies and a shifting towards delivering tools for consumers. These tools would be used to empower consumers to create their own Mashups, connecting VoIP together with Social Media in a way meaningful for consumers. In my mind this is something that is inevitable. Something companies like Google and Yahoo! and others WILL be doing. I’m just looking to accelerate this to happen sooner rather than later.

And when this does happen, it will be the start of a social communications revolution.

I am looking forward for this disruption and for the positive effects this will have on the future of social communications and the challenges it will present to the telecom industry.

This area is one of the concepts I am exploring to discuss during my speech at Spring 2008 VON taking place in San Jose March 17th – 20th. If you would like to attend as a blogger – just drop me a note. I look forward to seeing everyone in San Jose.

(full disclosure – FWD International is a startup I am chairman of and we are actively working on connecting VoIP and social media. VoiceMail is one of our applications on Facebook.)

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Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook

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Posted by jeff on January 2, 2008 09:09 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Oh WOW! Thanks for the great info!!

Posted by: RedFox at February 11, 2008 12:15 PM

Thanks for the good info

Posted by: ManBearPig at February 2, 2008 06:30 PM

Jeff,
Interesting theory that this will be disruptive. I'm wondering though if it can be that big of a disruption without a revolution in privacy controls first.

When I'm online, I'm typically on at various levels - for example, Twitter, where I'm @tojosan, I can be on in a passive sense, watching and dropping in a comment or thought and not being committed to responding or contributing.

When I'm on IM however, and marked as available, there is a certain expectation that if you send me a message I'm willing to engage i one on one conversation. There are limited controls though in most clients to group folks and control their access to me in a granular way.

Likewise Skype has the same issue, a lack of fine grained privacy controls.

My point is that creating interoperable and standards based VOIP solutions is not overly meaningful unless tied in with good controls for the user and good rules to protect users. For example, unlisted truly means unlisted, and no solicitation means no solicitation.

I'm imagining once use of VOIP becomes near ubiquitous that those privacy issues will come to light even more.

All that said, no arguement that this could be the year when VOIP really sparks and goes, and makes the Telcos step up and take notice.

Posted by: Todd jordan at January 6, 2008 04:57 PM

i was just thinking about 'open standards' and also communications free of any phone company 'middle man' when i began to realise that among the people i know the ones who are using VOIP use it almost exculively for connecting to PSTN. the people from whom i make and recieve calls without any PSTN interconnect i am usually using skype, gtalk(which i know uses the 'open' jingle satndard; but this is not a widely used protocal like SIP), aim or another 'proprietary' protocal.

this makes me wonder just how much the use of 'open' standards will help acheive a goal of 'free' communications.

i sometimes wish that there would would evolve an open standard that does not easily intergrate with the traditional phone networks. yet at the same time lends itself well to use of devices such as mobile phones with internet data connections. the thing is that i find with the exception of a few very technically inclined friends that i have(and not evan all of them) the SIP users seem very reluctant to give anyone their SIP URI's. they are often too concerned about things such as the possiblity that they may not recive a proper caller ID to give out anything other than the PSTN DID number to anyone. they are really only interested in using VOIP to save money on PSTN termination. but only if VOIP is being used for both incoming and outgoing calls will we see the reality of free calling.

Posted by: willy at January 3, 2008 12:53 AM

Posted by: Kfir Pravda at January 2, 2008 04:55 PM

Oooh, a VoiceMail application on FaceBook? Lemme try it :D

Posted by: Henrik Pauli at January 2, 2008 02:59 PM

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