Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Several reports emerged yesterday around three new Facebook features.  Previously promised, it looks as if these will be delivered in the New Year:

• Fine grained privacy controls.  Long demanded, it looks as Facebook users will finally be able to differentiate between business, personal, casual and other kinds of contacts.  Let's hope these controls turn out to be the killer feature that everyone has been asking for.
• Foreign language versions.  With the surge in subcribers from Western Europe and the Middle East, foreign language versions will help Facebook to accelerate it's growth outside North America.  Although, to date being English only hasn't been much of an impediment in some countries, such as Turkey, where Facebook has grown at over 200% per month some months.
• Mailing large groups.  All those folks who rushed out and created large groups, and then were disappointed that they turned into useless spam catchers will be happy with this. 

These seemingly small changes will be welcome and important as Facebook matures into a platform that can support real businesses.

Russell Shaw had a chance to chat with a few employees at beleaguered VoIP provider Vonage while at CES.  He walks away less skeptical than before after seeing some the new VPortal, Contact Book, and Call Blast features.  Says Russell:

Rather than biting the bullet and trying to go the triple-play route as their broadband Internet service provider rivals are, Vonage is digging in, preferring to broaden their service set.

No doubt that triple play is a dead end.  My prediction is that triple play will kill the LECs as well, as they distract themselves with television rather than expand their core services. 

Devin Holloway wonders if Google plans to include automatic speech recognition in the Grand Central service.  He then speculates that perhaps they're simply not interested in enabling third parties to build applications that integrate with Grand Central.  That would be a pity if it were true.  Grand Central would be a killer mashup platform.

Craig?

I'm a big believer in the whole "eat your own dogfood" ethos in product development.  People who eat their own dog food use their own products to understand how well they work,and what can be done with them.  So, I'm going to run a public podcasting experiment, and you're invited to participate.  On a daily basis, at 8 AM, I'll be online with a selection of the days tech headlines, to chat with anyone who wants to discuss them.  The show's called Squawk Box, and it'll be done as an iotum FREE Conference Call. We'll talk about 4 or 5 of the days tech headlines (probably a selection from TechMeme) for 30 minutes, and then redistribute the recording afterward as a podcast on this blog. 

Attached is a quick sample (two minutes) of what I've got in mind from this morning.  I simply scanned the headlines and recorded a few soundbites, by myself.  On Monday morning, I'd like to do this with a few more people, not just me. Here's a link to the Monday call. Look for the rest of the week's calls to be up later today.

See you Monday! 

 

 Squawk Box Jan 11 [2:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download