by Rich KarpinskiOctober 5th, 2007
Telcos may look at Facebook (and MySpace and Beebo and Twitter, etc) as interesting, faddish anomolies, or at most, something to copy and steal from (particularly in the mobile realm).
But as the social networking site continues to evolve, it is looking more and more like a communications hub. And that should put it directly on the Tier 1 carrier radar.
In the latest development, according to blog FaceReviews.com, the new Facebook instant messaging application is now live on the site. Built by Facebook (rather than it’s growing community of Facebook developers) , the IM application could keep its users on-site even more than they already are by adding a real-time communications element to the environment.
Not to be outdone, VoIP providers are flocking to Facebook as well with applications that let people do “click-to-call” meetups within the site or even conduct Skype-style peer-to-peer PC-and-headphone based calling.
For instance, VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, has begun positioning his long-incubated Free World Dialup project as a social media play, starting with a Facebook voice mail application. Another company, BabyTel, is rolling an Facebook-integrated VoIP application this week. Also on Facebook (live or in development): VoIP and click-to call apps from Jajah, Jangl, YackPack and Truphone, plus a nifty conference call app from Iotum. And that’s just the tip of the “social VoIP” iceberg. As a telco-competitive play, Facebook’s playback (or that of any other social network) is becoming crystal clear.
- Users create their home page/profile page on the site, bringing in everything that is (virtually) important to them, including:
- Users create their home page/profile page on the site, bringing in everything that is (virtually) important to them, including:
- All their friends and colleagues, who:
- Create a web (or social graph) of connections, comments, cross-posts and other inter-links
- As the social graph deepens, social network communities begin to rely more and more on this new environment as the (powerful yet convenient) hub for ALL its communications, starting with:
- Cross-linked comment posts, “wall” news feeds, etc., ultimately moving on to:
- Online-centric communications extensions like instant messaging or newer modes like Twitter and then taking that mobile with:
- Built in SMS cross-posting and mobile phone site-posting before ultimately adding:
- Voice-based communications including on-site voice mailboxes, voice “blast” capabilities, conferencing or voice-based group chat applications and ultimately voice calling in its all its glorious forms but largely VoIP-based and peer-to-peer with PSTN (public switched telphone network) terminations where and when they are needed.
That vision posits Facebook or other sites as a be-all-end-all communications applications hub — and chillingly relegates telcos as (their biggest fear) dumb pipes at the outer-end of the communications value chain.
Does Facebook have your attention yet?
Related Topics: All stories, Social Networks |
by Rich KarpinskiOctober 5th, 2007
Google, MSN, Yahoo, Amazon. These companies first and foremost are businesses, managing advertising- or e-commerce-driven Web sites.But these mega-Web-companies are also building the next-generation of computing utilities — George Gilder eloquently calls them “information factories.”
Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels opened the door just a bit to Amazon’s cloud factory, publishing a paper describing the massive storage infrastructure underlying Amazon.com (not to be confused with Amazon’s public-storage Web service, S3)
From the paper’s abstract:
Reliability at massive scale is one of the biggest challenges we face at Amazon.com, one of the largest e-commerce operations in the world; even the slightest outage has significant financial consequences and impacts customer trust. The Amazon.com platform, which provides services for many web sites worldwide, is implemented on top of an infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers and network components located in many datacenters around the world. At this scale, small and large components fail continuously and the way persistent state is managed in the face of these failures drives the reliability and scalability of the software systems.
A massive self-healing application infrastructure is an endlessly fascinating concept to consider. I got wind of the Amazon paper from Nick Carr, author of “Does IT Matter” as well as the upcoming book “The Big Switch,” which looks at next-generation computing architectures as represented by firms like Amazon and Google — and, one would imagine, tier 1 telecom carriers. Carr does a good job of putting Dynamo into context:
At the start of the last century, the great engineering project was the creation of an electric grid that could deliver power to millions of users with a reliability and an efficiency that were previously unthinkable. Today’s great engineering project, of which Amazon’s Dynamo is but one manifestation, is to build a computing grid that can achieve similar breakthroughs in the processing and delivery of information.At the start of the last century, the great engineering project was the creation of an electric grid that could deliver power to millions of users with a reliability and an efficiency that were previously unthinkable. Today’s great engineering project, of which Amazon’s Dynamo is but one manifestation, is to build a computing grid that can achieve similar breakthroughs in the processing and delivery of information.
Call it cloud computing or cloud OS or simply the “googleplex” — whatever. It’s an approach to next-generation networks/applications that telcos need to get in tune with as well.
Related Topics: All stories, Cloud Computing |
by Rich KarpinskiOctober 5th, 2007
Telcos and cable providers spend untold hours on network capacity issues surrounding video delivery. Video delivery via the Web can be a bit more of a wild card — it’s hard to tell what service or individual video will hit big. But when something takes off, what would seem like a great situation can quickly become a bandwidth nightmare.
That seems to be the challenge facing Internet video service Veoh. The service began offering full movie downloads from its site via its VeohTV application, but as it grew in popularity it is only offering short previews and relying more on a peer-to-peer infrastructure — in which users effectively stream video to one another — to help reduce its bandwidth costs. Blog Contentinople reports that early Veoh users aren’t too happy with the situation.
It’s yet another version of the old quality of service (QOS) question, one that is particularly important when it comes to Web applications. Web apps are based on the idea that “just good enough” is good enough. At least it is until customers revolt.
Related Topics: All stories, Video/IPTV |
