Here’s a post from my personal account on G+.

There are already too many channels, but I can’t find a channel that everyone is listening to, and it’s a problem. I will cross post this on at least 5 of them: email, Facebook, Google Plus, IRC, and the Unblog.

Photo: vintageham.com

While at Astricon, every single night there were ad hoc groups forming to go to dinner. Some had American cells, some got the wifi cut off and had no data, etc. So how were we to keep in touch? The irony of a large conference entirely about telecommunications, convergence, VoIP and telephony is surely not lost on you, gentle reader. We really need a single channel if we want to keep in touch. That channel, for my part and until something better comes along is Google Plus.

If you want to be included in future dinners, wine tastings, lunches, breakfasts, strip clubs, poetry readings or whatever comes up when we get together in meat space or virtually, please get on Google Plus. It matters not if you do not follow anyone or are not active, but it does matter that that channel is the most flexible at the moment. Adding my prejudices, Facebook isn’t good for this, IRC is too old school, email too iffy. Assuming you have a cellphone and data, Google Plus is the way to go. If you eschew social networks – of which Google in NOT in my opinion – fine. But don’t be surprised if you don’t hear about things in a timely fashion.

8×8, Inc, recently introduced a new web-based UC offering called 8×8 Virtual Office Solo, designed specifically to meet the needs of single person businesses and is disruptively priced at $7.99/month. Bryan Martin, 8×8 Chairman & CEO, will provide an overview of the service and discuss the strategy behind its launch.

Virtual Office Solo includes an iPhone app, built-in faxing and a beta social media section for Twitter and Facebook connections. More about  Virtual Office Solo product on GigaOm Webworker Daily. Article: All VoIP News.

Like a heart-broken lover, after Wave, I hesitate to get excited about the open source projects I hear about. Wave never really panned out, and personally I think there was too much T & A and not enough brains and horsepower there. All show and little tell. On the other hand, there’s ThinkUp, a project just emerging from the ashes of its previous incarnations and looking refreshed and energetic.

ThinkUp (Expert Labs Project) is a PHP/mySQL program that will scour social media sites for its members and turn the cacophony (some would say CACAphony) it finds there into a nearly coherent conversion. Currently working with Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, it has a sporty plugin architecture and a simple, modern, clean look to its pages.

Wonderful, you say, drifting off, but what does it do?

I kinda wondered about that myself, so instead of setting up the crawler as a cron job, I ran it manually. Anyone into the open source world will enjoy watching the crawler cheerfully tell you what it is doing, babbling away with just enough info about how hard it’s working and how much juice Twitter is allowing you to suck in until next time. The crawler looks at the accounts you’ve set up, grabs the posts, Tweets, for example and stores them in the database. The data is sliced, diced and messed with and displayed in many different useful ways. I guess if you wondered about the expression “wisdom of the crowd” which I’d challenge daily, here’s a tool to test that very idea. One of the plugins available will decode short links, another does something with geolocation that is probably worth doing.

Allow members of your crowd to sign up for your ThinkUp site. They then connect your ThinkUp app to Twitter (and the other sites if you care to). Assuming people are talking on Twitter, and that they have allowed their posts to appear on the public timeline, you should be able to see conversations, whole subjects developing and interlinked.

Head over to Gina Trapani’s Github and grab the code. It literally took me 5 minutes to install and get it running. ThinkUp requires a server with php5,  mysql and a minimum of pep if you plan on having members and guests. Give it a try or wait until we open our own VUC ThinkUp.

BabyTEL is a Montreal based VoIP service provider, providing both residential and commercial VoIP access throughout the United States and Canada. First launching in May 2004 as a Canada-only operator[1], BabyTEL is now one of Canada’s leading VoIP service providers[2]. In February 2007, BabyTEL launched service in the U.S. market.

One of BabyTEL’s features is its single-line/multiple location capability, giving users the ability to route a single number to two or more phones that can be separated by a few feet or by thousands of miles. BabyTEL is in partnership with TalkSwitch, a small niche business service provider of both VoIP and analog small PBX type systems. BabyTEL is also a pioneer in social-networked VoIP having launched the an early integrated telephone service for the Facebook platform called Telephone.

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-295586.mp3|titles=babyTel Facebook Application]

IRC TRanscript 2009-12-04

[tweetthis]

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

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-41645.mp3]

The buzz of Astricon is getting louder, it’s almost here! Also, Dan Berninger tells us about the “rebirth” of FWD (Free World Dialup) and the new Facebook app. FWD brought a lot of people into the asterisk fold. RusselB talks about Astricon. DaemonSwitch for FreeBSD.