Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Before the end of the month, IE 7 is slated to be pushed to PC's everywhere.  It will be an automatic download. It isn't ready, Microsoft.  I've installed it with Windows Vista RC 2, and sites I use regularly are breaking.  Two examples:

• The Globe and Mail: comment icons are shifted into the centre of the text.
• WordPress Admin Console: the trackback form doesn't open completely. 

Either leave your dog at home, or make sure it's trained better before inviting it into my house to make a mess on my carpet. Please!

Yesterday, LiveJournal and Gizmo launched their new services allowing the use of voice in LiveJournal sessions.  TMCNet’s Patrick Barnard wrote an extensive feature on the topic.  Coincidentally, ZDNet’s Russell Shaw wrote a critique of Friendster, concluding that adding VoIP wouldn’t have helped.  And, on Monday, Martin Geddes’ opening speech at Voice 2.0 opined that VoIP without social networking was of no value.

They’re all right.

Russel’s argument that Friendster was broken, and VoIP wouldn’t have made a difference is correct. I drive an aging Ford Escort station wagon with cracked rear springs. Expecting VoIP to fix Friendster is a bit like hoping that by adding a roof rack to my car, I’ll be able to improve the ride.

Martin’s argument is that conversations are social.  Social networks are designed to facilitate conversations, and indeed, may become the directories of the future.  Social networks and voice are a natural pair. 

And Barnard takes that one step further with this simple question:  what does the world look like if the majority of conversations are facilitated through social networking tools?

If Web sites start putting free “click to call” services all over the Internet and consumers start getting used to making calls on their PCs, what impact will that have on the major carriers (who already have their own VoIP woes, as they ravage their traditional phone service customer base by switching people over to low-cost VoIP services)? And what about the hundreds of smaller-sized VoIP service providers who are looking to get a piece of the consumer VoIP pie? Will only the ones which have signed deals with the major Web sites prevail?

Cool!

An awful lot of folks have their knickers in a knot over DFJ’s latest investment, Pay Per Post.  The company bills it as a new form of blog advertising.  The business concept is pretty simple: just as you can post a request on RentACoder, or ELance to have someone code you up small programming projects, on Pay Per Post you can ask for bloggers to write about a particular topic, and pay them for it.

The digerati complain that it’s deceptive, and that it’s turning the blogosphere into one giant advertorial.  TechCrunch opines that Pay Per Post wants to “buy your soul“.  Curious, I joined, and frankly, the controversy is unwarranted. 

There are currently just 91 open postings on Pay Per Post.  Most are for very specific niches.  One is a realtor that wants you to write about Kirkland Washington.  Another is a company trying to get bloggers to write about Beach Cruiser Bikes.  And a third is a site trying to draw attention to itself as an independent reviewer of body building supplements.  There was exactly one site with a VoIP theme — a forum for Vonage users, trying to draw attention to itself.  Out of 91 listings, I found three that were vaguely related to this site, offering me an opportunity to earn a grand total of $23.50.

In other words, not much of an incentive to write.  If you were really determined, I suppose, you could write 10 posts per day, and get through all 91 listings in nine days.  Given that most of the listings are paying $4 to $5, with the occasional $10 listing thrown in, you’d be lucky to make $60/day for your effort… if you wrote on every topic being offered.

Could you really write about every topic that they offered?  Credibly? I just went to the doctor yesterday for my annual physical.  I’m 42 years old, and 40 lbs overweight.  Somehow I can’t seem myself as a reviewer of a site offering body-building supplements. 

And that, in a nutshell, is why most bloggers are likely to take a pass on Pay Per Post.

Voice 2.0 Conference founder Ross Macleod had a piece titled Telecom’s Perfect Storm appear in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, outlining and commenting on the various themes of the conference.  It’s a nice overview, and will raise the visibility of Voice 2.0 themes and companies by giving them a much broader audience.  Nice job Ross!

The preferred attack point for cellular VoIP plays today seems to be disintermediating mobile long distance from the handset.  For the last few weeks I’ve been playing with an alpha release of T@lkster, a new Voice 2.0 offering which does exactly that.

T@lkster’s promise is that you will be able to make inexpensive long distance calls from any mobile handset to anyplace in the world without downloading new software. Unlike Jajah, T@lkster allows the call to be originated from the handset (without a downloaded client) which is much less expensive in Europe.  Unlike Rebtel, T@lkster requires no special numbers to be created and mapped.  The service operates transparently.  In addition, unlike either of the above services, T@lkster lets you terminate your calls on literally any client you can think of — IM, a PSTN handset, or VoIP.  Moreover, it gathers presence information from your contacts IM accounts to show you whether or not the recipient might be available to take that call.

To use, you simply browse to an available contact and initiate a call.  You can see each user’s online presence, and then choose to make a call to that user.  The first photo below shows T@lkster running in the Blackberry 8700 window, with “available” presence indicated for Janice, and the T@lkster helpdesk, but not Andy or Howard.  What you can’t see is that Janice is reachable either on MSN, or via her home or cell phone lines, while Andy’s contact record is set to reach him on either his Gizmo project number, or his GrandCentral number. 

The second photo shows the two modes that T@lkster can operate in.  You can have it perform a callback, the way that Jajah does, or have it initiate the call from your handset,as Rebtel requires. 

  

T@lkster came out of stealth at the recent Voice 2.0 conference in Ottawa.  After CEO James Wanless’ pitch, I had a chance to catch up with him and CTO Mark Gelman at the Voice 2.0 conference.  Gelman let it casually be known that one of the “hidden under the covers” features of T@lkster is a web services interface, allowing the T@lkster system to be driven from an application.  That feature alone has tremendous potential, and the ability to make T@lkster into a true long tail player in the Voice 2.0 ecosystem.

This company has a lot of promise.  Watch for the open beta coming soon. Their blog is at http://talkster.wordpress.com/.