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Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet)
Trevor Baca
discusses the need for voice connectivity on the web.
"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."
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Voice is overrated Posted Feb 22, 2007 23:33 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link] Voice has drawbacks: it's too synchronous, it's evanescent, it disturbs other people in the area, it can be overheard, etc, etc.
Hell, at work I'll sometimes IM the guy in the next cube with a question rather than talk to him -- he (or me) might already be on the phone or in the middle of something else, he can answer my message when he gets a chance, it isn't going anywhere.
Ditto the reverse -- I hate being interrupted by the phone when someone could just as easily have IM'd or emailed me.
Click to ring both phones? Hell no.
Voice is overrated Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:08 UTC (Fri) by jhardin (guest, #3297) [Link] +1
Voice comms can be *very* intrusive.
Voice is overrated Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:18 UTC (Fri) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] Indeed. They seem to totally miss the advantages of text above speech. Text is asynchronous and voice isn't.
For me it's also much easier to write English than to speak it. No idea how true that is for other non-native English speakers. It probably is easier for the observer though.
Especially in a "globalized" environment Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:48 UTC (Fri) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] Sadly I find myself needing to use chat with a few of my colleagues in India. No offense intended, but a couple of them have accents that are so thick that I just can't understand them via voice ... but their writing is generally much better.
(Of course I try to be circumspect and tactful about the issue --- and it's really only that extreme with a couple of them, roughly half of our workforce ... ~5K employees and contractors, are located in or recent immigrants from other countries. But still ...)
Especially in a "globalized" environment Posted Feb 23, 2007 10:30 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It's the reason we are not using phone here at all - unless it's emergency. We DO use VC often, and it helps immensely, but of course before you'll call someone by videophone you'll contact him via IM first (because videophone is even more intrusive the normal phone).
Offtopic globalisation rant Posted Feb 23, 2007 14:45 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] Talking to the friendly people in the Indian call centres which operate all the Australian telcos these days can be amusing. Today I had to correct a misspelling over and over -- the lady repeatedly heard my Aussie letter 'I' as an 'A'. 'I for India' overcame the problem and provoked laughter.
It does really irritate me, though, when personal names are faked to make foreign customers more 'comfortable' -- we're just not that insular anymore, no country is. I know and she knows that her name is not 'Kylie'! Lately I've met more Divitas and Bharats, which is pleasing, but some call centres persist in the lie.
Reminds me of My Fair Lady :-) Posted Mar 3, 2007 2:07 UTC (Sat) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Eliza Doolitle: Didn't ah sy that? Professor Higgins: No, Eliza, you didn't sigh that, you didn't even "say" that. - From the Audrey Hepburn/Rex Harrison movie My Fair Lady.) No disrespect intended. I totally value cultural diversity.
Voice is overrated Posted Feb 23, 2007 13:33 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] It's easier for me to write than speak, and I'm a native English speaker! (Mind you, most speakers don't have stammering *and* slurring to contend with...)
also Posted Feb 23, 2007 3:49 UTC (Fri) by ccyoung (guest, #16340) [Link] text is logged, can be searched - it's taking minutes of a conversation rather than the conversation itself, which, in the technical world, is generally preferable
Voice is overrated Posted Feb 23, 2007 9:48 UTC (Fri) by stijn (subscriber, #570) [Link] Sometimes e-mails take a lot or a huge amount of back and forths when terminology or goals or understanding of context is not shared. Whenever I feel an issue is headed that way I prefer to converse by phone. Text may be asynchronous, but voice is interruptible.
Establishing vocabulary is useful Posted Feb 23, 2007 10:29 UTC (Fri) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328) [Link] I like email communication for exactly this reason. I cannot count the number of times that I've watched groups of very smart people supposedly come to agreement via voice discussions either in person or on teleconferences. But then, when the real details get written down you find that there was no consensus but only the usual fake, politic evasion of conflict that is what society has developed as the basis for most speech.
Specifically, I like email communication used to convey essays and documents. The use of email for one-line "instant replies" and cheering is just about as useless as those famous two-minute phone calls to "touch base".
The problem is that written communication often fails due to the number of people promoted to positions of importance who have absolutely appalling communication skills. If they cannot brow-beat and evade responsibility through ambiguous yet "assertive" discussions, they're completely at a loss. So they encourage an evasive culture around them, and you end up with an organization paralyzed and unable to actually communicate anything.
Establishing vocabulary is useful Posted Feb 23, 2007 10:37 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Surprisingly enough I have totally different view of such discussions. Usually they are very productive and useful where I work. May be because leader must write summary of agreements reached in such discussion and send it to all participants via email afterwards ? Kind of hard to evade responsibility or conflict when you know that result of discussion must be written by you personally (no matter what others are saying it's leader's responsibility to put words "on paper") and that it'll be visible by all participants and will be archived forever...
Establishing vocabulary is vital Posted Feb 24, 2007 5:46 UTC (Sat) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link] I can't begin to count the number of times I've had to bring technical discussions to a momentary halt to define a word or phrase. Often two people in seeming agreement (or conflict) are assigning different, perfectly reasonable, meanings to the same word.Another problem is pronouns. `That', `it', `he', &c., are obvious to the speaker, but often not to the hearers. One of the two smartest people I ever met (Hi, Ziggy!) was so egregious that, instead of using a sentence or phrase to ask for clarification, I just took to interjecting ``antecedents!'' every minute or two, whereupon he'd backtrack and disambiguate. It always struck me as odd that such problems arise so often among engineers, whose jobs demand precision. Clearing up those misunderstandings almost requires synchronous, voice, communication. If such an error becomes established in text, it can invalidate days of effort before being corrected.
Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet) Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:29 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] What you need for VoIP communication, IMO is a simple-to-use P2P protocol.
None of this 'Windows Workgroup' style BS were you have these central servers you have to go through and subscription services and blah blah blah. It's expensive, redundant, and all it realy accomplishes is to add overhead, latency, and complexity to the problem.
VoIP isn't like text were you have store-n-forward type thing were you have conversations that not just span minutes, but span days and even months sometimes.
It's a realtime event, not suitable to the Web-style interaction people are used to with things like a web browser or email. Even with IM it's not so instant. A person can be working and dealing witha IM conversation quite nicely.
Plus voice communication is _not_ a social activity. Not at all. How many people can you have in one conversation? A dozen? Maybe if your lucky before it breaks down.
You can have lectures, to be sure, or meetings, were you have one person in control at a time while other people are mostly passive. And for that it's handy to have a central server since it's difficult for individuals to have enough bandwidth and low enough latency at their desktops to give good performance for a lot of people.
One thing that seems somewhat natural is IM or chat combined with VoIP. Were the IM or chat is used to locate people and initiate conversations, but the conversations should still happen in a pure peer-to-peer form.
A question needs to be asked Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:48 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] What has this to do with Linux or LWN?
A question needs to be asked Posted Feb 23, 2007 1:17 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Umm... nothing, really.
Where is the problem? Posted Feb 23, 2007 18:00 UTC (Fri) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] Whether something is relevant to LWN is for the LWN editors to decide. Considering the number of comments on this article it seems they correctly judged that it would be interesting to a substantial portion of their audience. Where is the problem here?
Where is the problem? Posted Feb 23, 2007 20:13 UTC (Fri) by gravious (subscriber, #7662) [Link] Maybe the LWN staffers are thinking of implementing a [call me now] button next to each poster's nic and are gauging our reaction!
Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet) Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:55 UTC (Fri) by caitlinbestler (guest, #32532) [Link] Images and text messages conform to the desired presentation/identity.Voice does not. When Social Web sites can offer fictionalized real-time substitute voice messages things might change.
Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet) Posted Feb 23, 2007 1:45 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Vocoders can if you do it correctly.
But ya most people don't like to play themselves on the internet.
Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet) Posted Feb 23, 2007 9:35 UTC (Fri) by macc (subscriber, #510) [Link] you can not meaningfully skip through a voice recordingor browse it in "fast forward".
you can not reasonably talk with more than 5 persons
you can take your time typing.
you can do citations
you can search it
you can easily span timezones.
voice is for getting emotionally at people.
Just ordered my Borg implants from Microsoft... Posted Feb 23, 2007 1:28 UTC (Fri) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link] I'll post back after I've had some experience with the collective.
Isn't there already a mechanism for this? Posted Feb 23, 2007 2:57 UTC (Fri) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link] Called the telephone?Seriously, the few times I've used VOIP it sounded as if the other person were speaking underwater, with each word coming through in a single bubble, to be heard as it popped.
Isn't there already a mechanism for this? Posted Feb 23, 2007 7:43 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] Crappy connection, client or provider...
Isn't there already a mechanism for this? Posted Feb 23, 2007 10:42 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Connection or provider. This is typical result of saturated line - client tries to cope by reducing quality and removing silence but still it's barely enough. We've had such problems in the past (before we've switched providers).
Isn't there already a mechanism for this? Posted Feb 23, 2007 11:29 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] Could be the client too.
I've had some problems myself with Ekiga, not that it's crappy, it just works like ยค%"# with my provider (Musimi, local danish provider)... Sounds getting all choppy most of the time... Every other client works perfectly with my provider, and Ekiga works perfectly with other providers, so until it gets fixed (or until I find out why it's doing it), I just use Linphone (when I'm not at home, at home I use a HW adapter)
Dennis
Internet speed Posted Feb 23, 2007 11:39 UTC (Fri) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link] Voice is too slow :)I can browse a page of text, picking out the interesting bits, in the time it takes to listen to a single sentence. And, given the cumbersome protocols around voice communication, that single sentence is likely to be filler information that I already know from context. ("Hi, you're listening to...") And there's the lack of grep... but maybe that can be fixed with better tools.
vgrep Posted Feb 23, 2007 18:52 UTC (Fri) by ccyoung (guest, #16340) [Link] most humans use vgrep, a daemon which listens to voice. it issues an interrupt on key words, volume changes, and significant pauses. it also has a built-in heartbeat, alternating between a head nod and a "yes, dear".
vgrep Posted Feb 26, 2007 15:40 UTC (Mon) by knshaum (guest, #38431) [Link] Don't you know better than to run unnecessary daemons? It wastes cycles, and creates security risks that could allow others to take control of your system. ("Honey, would you do me this *one* little favor...?")
I disabled my voice listener years ago, and it's done wonders for my productivity.
Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet) Posted Feb 23, 2007 12:13 UTC (Fri) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link] id say "use the system that best fits the job".
for a myspace like site, async communications works. if people know each other offline they can often agree to call each other without having to go via myspace to do so.
same with email and im. if its time critical to get a response, call their mobile phone. then its im and email when sorted by how important it is to get a reply NOW...
why this sort? because with a phone you get a instant feedback if the person is available.
the im systems supposedly have a similar feature, but more often then not people are present when set as away or not present while set as present...
email have no indication what so ever on the persons status, therefor its the worst for trying to get a quick response.
Telecom "innovators" ? Posted Feb 23, 2007 21:32 UTC (Fri) by xav (subscriber, #18536) [Link] These telecom "innovators" were left out of the social revolution because they want us to pay by the word (spoken word, SMS, MMS, whatever).
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