Techhawking

The two big names in the messaging industry came out with two major upgrades today. Yahoo announced “Yahoo Messenger 8.0” for Windows platform and MSN released their Windows Live Messenger. While both MSN and Yahoo are offering some form of VoIP support, the big thing for Yahoo was the opening up of the APIs for its messenger and the discussion happening is around its Yahoo! Messenger On-the-Road offering which seems to be some kind of a paid service which will grant you access to more than 30000 wifi spots around the world. On MSN side the big thing is the announcement that Philips is now making Voip handsets with embedded Windows Live Messenger in it. This trend of moving VoIP software to handheld devices is not new, but with Microsoft jumping into the market, it not very surprising why Skype is giving away free minutes.

Which brings this discussion to the third player in this market, Google. While MSN and yahoo are desperately trying attach the kitchen sink to their IM client, Google seems to be less interested in developing standalone “Google Talk” clients and is more interested in gathering generating grass root support with least bottlenecks for the end user. For coming late to the party, thats not too much to ask for.

However what we all miss to see in this picture is that in the IM world, MSN and Yahoo are not very far from what centralized networks like AOL and Compuserv looked like before they hooked up to the internet. Isn’t it a shame that you as a user of MSN also have to create a Yahoo, GoogleTalk, ICQ and AOL account just to talk to all of your friends ? And while you can sign up with just one ISP to visit all the websites on the internet is it really necessary to sign up with 10 different service providers just to exchange instant messages with your friends ? After all how different is instant messages from regular email messages ?

When Google decided to use an open protocol called Jabber which has close to 100 different client implementations, they did two things which was not very apparent outright. First they bought themselves a huge developer base which have been screaming about Jabber as an alternative to proprietary protocols. Second they have now forced MSN and Yahoo to acknowledge that inter-IM communication is eventually possible.
Infact, Jabber protocol, unlike other instant messaging protocols was designed ground up like SMTP protocol to be decentralized, flexible and diverse. Its so much alike like SMTP, that from a birds eye view Jabber could look like SMTP in the way it works.

GoogleTalk in short is what Internet was to AOL the reason why Google doesn’t care about GoogleTalk client is because Jabber like SMTP can be routed, archived and searched for targeted advertisements.

//p.s. In the current design GoogleTalk is not routable(s2s)… but that hopefully would be fixed soon.

Recently I wrote about skype invading the cellphone market. While this might be a few years away, something more interesting might happen much earlier.

A few companies at CEBit are showing off Skype to PBX gateways. [ Vosky , Spintronics , Zipcom ] Imagine how easy it would be communicate between two branches using VOIP protocols but without the expense of costly VOIP hardware.

I think this is a bag of good and bad news.

The good news is that skype will break down the artificial communication barrier between people and companies which live in different parts of the world. Up until recently we assumed that its ok to charge more if you want to talk with someone very far away. Its almost like we assume that travel fares are directly proposional to the distance. With the “national plan” going into effect most voice carriers provided a means for us to communicate with anyone in the country for the same fare. Unfortunately such a plan doesn’t exist internationally because unlike in US, voice carriers here don’t have agreements with all the countries in the world. Internet as per design broke down such barriers very early in its evolution. I’m very excited that skype is leading the way in making voice comm cheaper, which will go a long way in moving us towards a truely global economy.

Skype is a wonderful product, its free to use, has allowed other products to be built around it using its API. Its growth might almost be viral in nature. The bad news, however, is that we might be seeing a birth of another monopoly which is building its business around security through obscurity. I recommend reading a very fascinating presentation “Silver Needle in the Skype” by two gentlemen Philippe and Fabrice. They talk about how hard skype has been trying to keep its protocol closed. Even its installation binaries are rigged with obsfucated code and anti-debugging/anti-reverse_engineering mechanisms.

Skype is openning up holes in the network faster than most of us realize. What if someone finds a hole in skype software or protocol after it becomes a critical part of global communication infrastructure ? Are we setting up ourselves for a global catastrophe ?

Even though I personally like Skype, security through obscurity should be discouraged and I’ll try my best to look for alternatives unless skype opens up the protocol further.

Those of you who never talk to anyone outside this (US) island you live on, chances are that you have never used skype. For others who can’t buy unlimited minutes to other parts of the world, thank skype for trying to change the world.

But skype world is not perfect yet. You still have to use your computer to make and receive calls. There are some skype-phone gateways available, but most of them are just hacks at best. A few companies have big plans for skype in the near future and here are some interesting details I gathered over the last few weeks.

To begin with there are 4 classes of skype devices currently out there.

• Traditional headphone and microphones devices, using speaker/mic-in connections on the computer
• Intelligent wired USB devices which can interact with Skype software on the computer and make/receive calls. Some even have a lcd display on the handset.
• Intelligent USB devices which can do whatever the wired devices can do, but you have the flexibility of moving around without the wires. The catch is that there is a base module which is always attached to the USB port of the computer. And your computer has to on for it to work.
• Skype on handheld devices which requires you to buy expensive PDAs to make free/cheap phone calls

Most of these hardware are available on ebay, froogle and skype.

A few days ago, a friend showed me some interesting news about FON on Om Maliks Blog. Fon is a interesting community project which promotes wireless access sharing by promissing connectivity to its large network of POPs around the world. The catch is that if you want to access thier POPs, you have to set one FON wireless gateway yourself. Aha.. if you know how bittorrent works, u will try to draw some similarities here.

Anyway, so I heard that Google and Skype are two of the investors in Fon. Google, who have been heavily investing in the last mile connectivity (free wireless in cities like mountain view) have a lot to gain by monitoring user activity. But what I couldn’t understand was the reason skype getting into it.

Until I figured out that skype heavily depends on internet availability to allow customers to make phone calls, and without this network being available, every one of its customers will continue to depend on traditional means of wireless communication which bites into thier revenue.

If skype could provide internet connectivity over 802.11, skype users might think about just using skype for thier calls. But who on earth wants to cary their seven pound laptops around with them ? I’m glad you asked.

There are a few vendors out there who have been very busy building 802.11 based Skype phones which don’t need any USB at all. There are a few others who are building 802.11 into the regular cellular phones such that customers have a choice about which network to use when there is a 802.11 network available. Interesting. So who are these guys ?

• Netgear
• Calypso Wireless: C1250i WiFi-GSM
• Motorola

I recently bought free.1 phone which is a wired USB device to use it with my skype account on my powerbook. Though it worked beautifully (as expected) , I’ll probably recommend everyone out there to wait for the 802.11 devices to come out if you can. Also, even though I mentioned about FON, I personally would never set it up without putting it behind a firewall of some kind. So in other words I’ll probably end up paying FON/Skype instead of me setting up the FON wireless device on my network.