Many VoIP geeks aren’t into the social media part of the Internet, yet I find it to be an integral part of both business and pleasure today.

Stefan has posted the video of my presentation at AMOOCON. We all look at our talks and say “OMG, was I really that bad?” I warn you in advance, and have made note of it, my talk starts way too slowly.

The idea was to compare social networking in 1976, 1996 and 2006 and then today, 2009 by evoking my ham radio days in L.A. We used a 220 Mhz repeater and walkie talkies to talk on the phone from anywhere years before the cellphone became ubiquitous. In 1986, I was using the Internet without even knowing what it was with rlogin, rpipe, etc. In 1996, I built a PHP 2 site that basically did exactly what Twitter does, an open IM with a web interface. In 2006, Twitter came along and in 2009 we have a growing number of how to keep track of friends and more importantly, make new connections in our centers of interest.

The link with VoIP is that we now are able to meet people like Dan York, Jeff Pulver and many other movers in the VoIP space through all the usual channels and hopefully through the our own VUC as well. The VUC started around March 2007 and has grown in many ways since then, thanks to Mark Spencer’s immediate support and later, Digium’s realization of the importance of the whole social transformation that is taking place on the Internet. We have had some help from the people whose logos you see at the top of the page and I’m grateful to them and of course to every participant, especially the core group of “friends”, all of whom I hope to meet some day.

r/z