Response from: tom    (03/11/08 8:04pm)

this brings up another topic i have been thinking about. i read a lot about the future of VOIP and the concepts of presence and invites. i am not at all convinced that this is the way people want to use voice communications. particularly if it is on both ends.

i really believe that most people actually like the idea of ringing a phone at a specific location or a specific device(like a cell phone). with a move to presence we will have an issue that people will not know if they are being personally being blocked from calling someone(or some business, etc) or if the individual is indeed really busy or unavailable.

while there may certainly be a market for voice enabled communication within IM clients or directly on websites i only see this catching on as a supplement to and not a replacement for traditional phone service. there will always be people who like to place calls anonymously(particularly to business that they do not wish to have calls(ex. telemarketers) returned from). so what we will end up with are a lot of people use multiple VOIP accounts with different aliases and still will not be able to achieve the original goal of presence.

for similar reasons i believe that google's grandcentral is also a very flawed concept. what it does is give you one number that rings all of your phones(home, work, cell etc.) and some screening mechanisms that are based on caller ID. the problem is that most of the calls in need of screening come through without caller ID or different caller ID's each call. a far better concept is a service that lets you get rid of the excess phones(home, bussiness, etc.) and also lets you put your calls into categories that go to different voicemails, etc. but instead of giving one number for all your phones it would give a bunch of numbers that all ring one phone. that way you get rid of some phones, all calls goto your cell phone(or other) but they are segregated because you give a business number to business contacts, a personal number to friends and family, a BS number that goes straight to VM if you suspect it will be used by telemarketers.

well this ended up going completely off topic but kind of came up reading about the skype spam issues.

cheers