[Infowarrior] - Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk?

[Richard Forno]

Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk?
by Trevor Baca
02/22/2007
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/etel/2007/02/22/doesnt-the-social-web-realiz
e-that-people-talk.html

During my upcoming presentation at ETel, Voice and the Web: The New Terrain,
I'll be examining how the global telephone network evolved from a completely
closed system to where we're headed when the global telephone network
finally becomes available to applications developers everywhere.

In the course of putting together the presentation I asked myself why much
of the 2.0 hoopla isn't about voice.

We're telecom innovators. We think about people and communications and
technology a lot. And we look at Myspace and can't help but wonder how all
that happened without us. Put another way, just how did social computing get
so social without voice?

First, let's check the observation. Tens of millions of messages, perhaps,
pass through Myspace daily. Those messages are text, images, or both. But
not voice. And yet voice seems so obvious. Friend online? Click here to ring
both your phones. But no.

On flickr we find photos from everywhere in the world. And looking at
everybody's stuff even turns out to be fun and engaging. And we can see
exactly who took what, and why. But click here to ring the photographer's
phone? Again, no. No voice.

And Craigslist? Do people call each other when they use humanity's largest
watercooler to sell a sofa? In fact, they frequently do. This one's
interesting. Clicking through the want ads and personals turns up a
surprising number of phone numbers, frequently lightly scrambled‹"4* 15 #
three two six 1805 for more info"‹to throw off the spammers. More phone
numbers, in fact, than we might expect. So Craigslist allows for the power
of voice but, crucially, doesn't do anything to actively promote voice
between users. Why not?

The technology exists today to pass out one-day, three-day, or seven-day
disposable telephone numbers to anybody buying that sofa or looking for a
date. And away would go the spambots, forever. But, no. No voice.

Why? Doesn't the social web realize that people talk?

eBay is our current best counterexample to the voiceless web. eBay believes
in the power of voice. So much so, in fact, that it bought Skype for
billions of dollars.

So, on the one hand we have Myspace and Craigslist‹currently the first and
seventh largest websites on the planet‹whose planners and designers either
don't know they can bring voice to their users, or don't care. And, on the
other hand, we have eBay‹probably the world's largest online buyers'
community‹spending billions to bring Skype to users that could have been
Skyping all along, if only they had cared. Both parts of this equation are
bizarre. A complete lack of interest in voice on one side together with an
obvious over-response on the other.

Part of the problem may be that voice doesn't actually make sense in all of
the social contexts that we, as telecom innovators, might hope. Maybe flickr
is a case in point. If browsing the world's photos means that we're looking
mostly at photos taken by people we've never met, from different time zones,
maybe voice just isn't the right way to reach out and make an introduction.

Another part may be fear of integration. Up until very recently, if you
found yourself hosting a well-trafficked site with a large user base, it
wasn't at all clear how you could offer up voice to your users, even if you
wanted to. This may be what's going on with Myspace. The obvious interaction
guffaws of the site are the stuff of legend in the usability community. That
could point to any number of things, of course, but one likely culprit may
just be the risk of integrating anything at all with site growth that rapid.

And then, there may be a genuine lack of interest on the part of some of the
most successful of the social sites. I can't be certain, but I suspect this
to be the case with Craigslist. Perhaps Craig himself doesn't care. Or
perhaps nobody's approached him. Or perhaps it simply isn't clear enough yet
that voice is a genuine possibility on the Web.

Where voice simply isn't the right tool for the job‹flickr, perhaps‹then we
can stop asking questions. But where voice is simply disadvantaged‹either
through the lack of interest or because of integration difficulties‹we owe
it to ourselves to look past these proximal causes and go at least one layer
deeper.

Consider, to start with, that voice, at least traditionally, has cost money.
The public network didn't come about for free. Then compare those decades of
centralized state planning and control to the free, drop-in Web
components‹think shopping carts and comment boards, as well as Google Maps
and Feedburner-type web services. It's easy to see why voice may not be the
first thing that springs to the minds of talented Web developers everywhere.
VoIP may, of course, turn "costs money" into a type of "free," but then we
run into the fact that whatever the outcome of the religious war on the
uptake of VoIP handsets, what users really love is wireless, which puts us
squarely back in the "costs money" domain of the PSTN.

Of course, costing money isn't the end of successful innovation. But it
probably doesn't help that the web has evolved as an almost exclusively
transaction-driven economy. Click here. For a search, for an API call, for
an image, an article, or a book. It doesn't matter what it is‹on the Web,
it's the outcome of a mostly stateless, mostly timeless transaction.

But voice? Voice has always been about minutes, unlimited local calling,
nights or weekends notwithstanding. It might help us to ask how we can turn
voice into the type of billing the Web expects. That is, a billed
transaction rather than a bunch of minutes.

And last‹and probably most fruitfully‹we can tackle the question of
integration and just how hard it is to use voice on the Web. Just how hard
should it be for a web developer to start or stop a telephone call? That's
something we've been tackling at Jaduka. And I'll be talking more about our
API at ETel, which will give developers direct access to, and all the
inherent benefits of, the world's highest-quality, ubiquitous,
public-switched telephone network (PSTN).

Client-side installs are a barrier to innovation, not a help. Web developers
and users alike hate Flash and Java downloads, and it seems unlikely Skype
will change these feelings in any significant way. So why shouldn't control
of voice on the Web look and act just like everything else on the Web‹that
is, like a Web service?

So I ask again: how did social computing get so social without voice? Maybe
part of the social web doesn't need us. But clearly other parts of the
social web will. Whatever the case, it will be up to us to package our
services, and to bill for them, in ways that web developers everywhere
understand, appreciate, and will explore.

Catch my talk at ETel on Wednesday, February 28, at 4:15pm­4:30pm, in Salon
ABCDE.

Trevor Baca is VP of software engineering at Jaduka and oversees software
engineering, real-time systems engineering, telephony services development,
information architecture, usability, and user-experience engineering teams.