Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Contrary to the bloggerati's chatter from a few weeks ago, Twitter's biggest competitor is not Jaiku.    Rather, it's Facebook.  With Facebook's new ability to update via SMS, Facebook is Twitter plus:

• aggregated feeds from outside sources
• significant personal / professional profile information available from members
• large networks of friends to draw from
• events, and groups to participate in
• conversation threads
• fine-grained privacy control
• a large audience already acquired

… and the list goes on.  As others have noticed, it's a killer combination.

Yes, it's true that Facebook can't deliver updates to my IM client the way that Twitter can (or at least, I haven't found that feature yet), but I am personally about to turn that feature on Twitter off.  While it's interesting to get a real time stream of tweets from my friend, it's also a disturbance during meetings, and actually interferes with getting real work done on the mobile phone. 

Entrepreneur Brian McConnell and I have been trading mail for the last couple of months about his latest project — the WorldWide Lexicon. It’s a social network for translating web pages.  Prettty simple idea, but perhaps also very compelling.

The way it works is as follows:

1. You register your site with WWL (Saunderslog is already done)
2. You encourage your readers to help translate your site into whatever languages they speak; direct them to demo.worldwidelexicon.org. (direct friendly URLs such as saunders.worldwidelexicon.org are coming this week)
3. Bilingual readers contribute and edit translations; monolingual readers can view translations in any language that someone has posted translations for (when you go to demo.worldwidelexicon.org you’ll see a grid of two letter language codes beneath each site, all you need to do is click on the code for the language you speak and read the translations or add your own
4. Translations are published on WWL as HTML, and also output as RSS loopback feeds, so you can loop them right back into your blog. Brian plans to be doing a lot to make republishing easy for publishers and for readers.

Many large sites are obviously candidates for full translations, and even selected elements of smaller sites make sense.

iotum business partner and blogger Moshe Maeir says he wants to be the most expensive VoIP provider, or at least that's what he wants his customers to be buying. Radical idea?  Not really.  Moshe is simply putting new services front and center for his customers.  If minutes are going to be a commodity, then being the most expensive carrier means providing the richest selection of new services.

Rock on!

We slipped out another update to Talk-Now, last night.  And, we're particularly proud of it because it's got one of the most asked for features that we've built yet.  For the first time, Talk-Now can not only notify you when the person you wish to speak with becomes available, it can also notify that person that you are waiting to speak with them and what you want to speak about. 

The SIP standard has contemplated the idea of a Subject line on phone calls since practically its inception.  The BlackBerry, however, with its qwerty keyboard is one of the only practical devices for implementing the subject feature.  I can't imagine using even T9 input to add a subject line to call requests on a traditional 12 key touch-tone phone pad. 

In order to do this, we made some substantial changes to the UI.  The Talk-Now Notify window has been replaced with an area titled Conversations, which now has a To-Call list (the list of people you are trying to reach) and a "Waiting to Talk to Me" list, which is the list people trying to reach you.  It also allows the person trying to reach you to specify a subject for the call so that you can determine the importance of that call to you, before deciding to take it. 

Two other big changes include:

1. on install, Talk-Now can now identify other BlackBerry owners in your address book so that you can invite them if you'd like.
2. Talk-Now also automatically adds missed calls to your Waiting to Talk to Me list allowing you to queue them up for a return call.

 So go ahead, and go to www.iotum.com/blackberry to sign up.  As always, the software is free of charge. Download it, invite some friends, and start enjoying the benefits of talking to the people you need to, when you need to, rather than their voice mail.