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Nov
6
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I just had a quick IM chat with Joel Selvadurai. He's just launched Messagr.com which overlays Skype's user directory with some interesting social networking meta-data. Essentially you can tag your Skype account with your own interests so people can find you and contact you easily and in real-time.
I'm suprised LinkedIn haven't made the Skype connection - Oh wait - imagine all those recruiters IMing and calling you at the wrong time !
If there we're a coolness rating for web startups, Messagr.com would be right up there - it merges web and IMS, has a social networking aspect, search, tagging, etc.
One word of caution with sites that use identity federation (I realize that's not quite the right term). Think about it - you give your user-names for all the accounts the service needs to access (in messagr's case - only Skype) and you protect that with a password. What are the chances that the password is the same as your password for the external services - pretty good I would imagine. Be careful what information you give up !
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Jun
16
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The competition for IP based services got a little hotter, with Yahoo annoucing the acquisition of Dialpad on Tuesday. You can read what Dialpad are saying here and eweek has a pretty in-depth article here
While it is good to see a strong established brand like Yahoo! joining the fray I don't think this will change the market much - VOIP will continue to thrive in the niche PC-PC market - typically catering for the tech. savvy. I think the broad consumer introduction of VOIP will only happen when established phone companies roll out the infrastructure for all and make it completely transparent to the consumer. Geeks care about VOIP, SIP, IMS - consumers care about cheap, reliable phone calls.
Other IP Services related news this week (for Skype fans at least) is the beta release of VSkype. I haven't had a real play with it yet so can't compare it to Video4Skype but it looks like you can have multi-way video conferences and desktop sharing so that's possibly a hint at targetting the Enterprise market (consumers don't need to share desktops ?)
