Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:29 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
Parent article: Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet)

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.

(Log in to post comments)