Phweet Greasemonkey hack

Phweet is the new service that seamlessly escalates conversations to multi-party voice. The user signals that they want to talk by sending a PhweetURL via text SMS, email, instant message, microblog etc. This PhweetURL enables the parties to connect without sharing additional information.

Now a Phweet Linkify Greasmonkey Script adds Phweet buttons to twitter.com (and search.twitter.com). Transform this:

Into this:

Note the addition of Phweet links () which allow quickly starting a Phweet directly from the Twitter page.

Get the script: http://sites.google.com/a/phweet.com/phweet-developer/code

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Skype - as broken as ever

Every time I’m forced to mess around with Skype, I find it still has issues making it not worth the effort.

Here’s the recent rash of the latest open issues:

1. It will not deliver caller ID (of my US mobile) on SkypeOut PSTN calls to the US - it is all setup on the Skype Accounts page, but it still just delivers garbage to the call recipient.
2. It will not send the SMS to verify the number for using in outbound SMS - is this hard?
3. Presence is totally useless and never seems to show the actual presence of (specifically certain) users on the buddy list - it shows them as not connected (or undefined, the little question mark) when they are actually on-line and able to receive calls.

And once again, I say to myself, “Oh yeah - now I remember why I stopped using this before.”

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Phweet - a phone call in a URL - goes public (alpha)

Phweet launched yesterday as a public alpha - this means it (mostly) works, but it probably still has many bugs to work out and has plenty of room for improvement.

Phweet is the brainchild of Stuart Henshall, probably best known as the founder of Skype Journal. When Stuart first brought the idea to me, I must confess I didn’t really “get it” - I realized there was something there, but I couldn’t get my mind wrapped around what it was, or how to take Stuart’s vision from idea to reality. Ultimately, I latched on to Phweet for two simple and fundamental concepts:

1. Escalate a Twitter exchange to Voice, quickly, easily, and without sharing new profile or contact info.
2. Make the “signaling” about the call public, or semi-public (shared with our Twitter followers in this case), making a phone call a truly “social” thing (for the first time in history?) and potentially enabling instant ad-hoc “swarms” - vastly different from traditional pre-planned conference calls.

These are big things, IMHO - but they only matter if the whole thing can be practical, easy, fast, and reliable. So my mission was to take Stuart, who always looks at the big picture (I mean REALLY big), and figure out to pull out from his grand vision, a bite-size nugget, something that could be implemented in the lifetime of a single human.

I also felt that Phweet is something so new, uncharted territory, that nobody could predict what its reception would be. Therefore, it needed to come to life, and let people feel it and touch it, but without requiring an outlay of millions of dollars or years of development.

Thus we arrive at this alpha release, and what Phil Wolf has labeled “Ruthlessly Simplified Disintermediation”

Phweet generates a link (a URL - like tinyurl) and that URL is plopped into a Twitter message (or where ever, really) - and people click that link to start talking to each other. It really is that simple. Some things can go wrong, but when it works - and it usually does - that really is it.

Furthermore, as noted in point 2 above, Phweet transforms a phone call into a social event, facilitating instant ad hoc “swarms” of people getting together in live real-time voice conversation, without all the hassle of setting up a bridge number, agreeing on using a certain tool/software, sharing all that contact info etc. Each person on a Phweet call can use the tool of their choice, such as SIP, PhoneGnome, Gizmo, Truphone (or, eventually, any phone, probably as a paid option) or simply use the integrated Tringme flash-based browser widget without installing any additional software or hardware. This lets people that don’t use SIP talk to those who do; and each person can use the “channel” (or method of connecting) that they wish, and nobody else on the Phweet needs to know what anybody else is using - you don’t need to give anybody your phone number, Gizmo account or any other such contact info.

A Phweet begins as a person to person call, but Phweets are meant to be social and so any Phweet can be instantly transformed into a multi-party conference call.

When you Phweet someone (or “send a Phweet” if you prefer), you can decide to make it “private” (sent with a Twitter “direct message”). In that case, you can still add people to the call, but only people you explicitly invite to the call can join in (and they must be following you on Twitter). If anyone else stumbles upon the link, they won’t be able to join the call or access the page.

Otherwise, a Phweet is sent via the public twitter-stream (with a message such as “@phweet http://phweet.com/Gyfc India PhweetUp at 3 pm today. Join by clicking url.”) and in this case anybody that sees that URL (whether via Twitter, IM, email, or any other way) can click the link and request to join. The “host” (the person that initiated the Phweet) can then approve that user and let them into the Phweet. In other words, the Phweet URL can be sent to anyone, using any means available - it doesn’t have to be sent only via Twitter. In fact, on the world’s first public Phweet, several participants learned of the call via alternative means, including Skype chat and RSS feeds.

Another aspect of using Twitter to broadcast Phweets is there is an automatic call history of sorts that persists in our twitter streams. It can be searched in all kinds of interesting ways (that link shows people who have joined public multi-party Phweets).

One objective of a Phweet is to make the path from tweeting to talking diabolically quick and easy. And that’s what we’ve focused on in this alpha implementation. We got a lot of our inspiration from Twitter, where the focus is on simplicity and minimalism. Phweet is about getting people together on a call quickly, facilitating spontaneous, unplanned interactions, which is where the important decisions are made.

So there you have it. Phweet is an experiment as much as anything. The community will decide where it goes from here - so far the twitter stream about it has been extremely encouraging. Maybe Stuart is on to something

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Need help locating my missing 92 Yr old Aunt

RILEY, MARGARET/ 92 YOA / DOB 11/30/1915
Missing from her Regina Way address in Grants Pass, OR. since 7/12/08.
Margaret lives alone, she is considered an endangered missing person.
ANY INFORMATION ON MARGARET RILEY’S
WHEREABOUTS
PLEASE NOTIFY,
GRANTS PASS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY
AT (541) 474-6370.
WFA, 5’03 HT, 145 LBS, GRY, BLUE

Official missing person’s report here: http://www.bdt.com/MISSING-PERSONS-FLYER-RILEY.pdf

The car is gray (silver/gray) (I don’t know why the flyer says “tan or blue”)

UPDATE: July 24, 2008

Sorry to say that our prayers to find Margaret have not been answered. After a hard day’s work or grid by grid searching, Margaret’s car (or Margaret) were not found. She has been missing since Friday July 11th. With each passing day, the chances for her survival are less. We had about 30 people from Search and Rescue, the Police Auxiliary and other volunteers working to search the Grant’s Pass city limits and some outlying areas. The Bureau of Land Management has been contacted and are searching for her in the more rugged terrain outside Grants Pass.

Next steps are to widen the search area, contact more agencies, put up more flyers, etc.

UPDATE July 28, 2008: see new site: http://findmargaretriley.wordpress.com/

UPDATE: August 10, 2008: Margaret was found in her car outside of town, off the road.  She is no longer with us. She lived a wonderful life. We will miss her.

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Why iPhone is not “boring”

I’ve seen several comments and posts recently suggesting that iPhone is just another boring story.

I believe an historic day passed us by last week. Sure, Apple opening up the iPhone App Store received some press, but I haven’t yet read anything that really “gets” the significance of this event. There’s all kinds of moaning and groaning about the quality of apps, the price etc. and while there may be truth to these gripes, the fact most people are missing is that, unless Apple screws it up in some big way, the world changed last week.

I consider it as potentially significant as the effect the introduction of WWW and Mosaic had on the Internet. Last week, Apple changed everything about the mobile phone ecosystem and I don’t think very many people noticed - yet. That world will never be the same, just like the Internet was never the same after HTTP.

The other players, whether device makers or carriers, are not even on the same planet - it seems like they aren’t even aware of the situation. They aren’t even asking the right question, to say nothing of having the right answer. There are hundreds of millions of mobile phones with Java on them - and nobody knows it. Most people have no idea how to buy anything for their phone beyond ringtones (if they even know how to do that). Their phones probably have the capability to run apps - but there is no place to get them. Well, or say in the case of Symbian phones, there are too many places to get them.

Apple is changing all that with the iPhone store. And gripe all you want about the warts of the current apps or the prices or whatever, all that mises the point. Ordinary people now know how to obtain apps (free or otherwise), how to install them - perhaps more significantly, the entire idea of adding apps to a phone is now “normal” - it’s now part of the collective consciousness.

And developers have a place to put them, not “yet another place”, but the place, the one and only place. I always said iPhone was about iTunes from the start.

Of course this is about distribution and execution - Apple has the right capabilities to create this “perfect storm”. Unlike carriers, Apple knows how to build and manage software and services (can you say iTunes?). Unlike other device makers, Apple has their own distribution and marketing - they don’t need to rely on the carriers to market their device.

The future of Mobile is now Apple’s to lose and the rest of the mobile space better be worried.

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PhoneGnome launches virtual PBX features

Today PhoneGnome introduced the new “PhoneGnome for Business” product with “Virtual Receptionist” for small/medium business (SMB) communication.

The service works with or without the PhoneGnome box, but one of the unique things about it is that when using it with the $100 box, you can use any existing number with the “Virtual Receptionist” (as your company’s main number) and get free inbound minutes. If you set up each virtual location with the box, all inter-office calls and transfers will be 100% free - even if those locations are oceans apart.

And what’s nice about the PhoneGnome approach is you don’t have to be a SIP or VOIP expert to set it up - the box self-configures when you connect it, doesn’t need a computer, and you use your existing regular phone numbers to call and transfer.

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WWDC: new iPhone with GPS and 3G now official

Well, there you have it folks. It’s official - The new iPhone with GPS is here, just now being demonstrated by Steve Jobs at WWDC. Details should be everywhere soon…

UPDATE: Available July 11th, 2008. Price: $199 for the 8GB iPhone 3G. $299 for the 16GB, $399 for the 32GB version.

Still locked to AT&T. Anybody know if the monthly fee is higher for the 3G? The EDGE service is $20/month flat rate in the U.S. How much is the 3G data plan?

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SIP, Interrupted

Brough Turner in his post SIP revolution, massively delayed speaks about why SIP has not taken off for user-to-user VoIP:

When SIP emerged in 1996, it’s support for direct connections from one user to another was extremely compelling. This was the VoIP protocol which would lead to a complete revolution in communications. Yes, you might refer to a directory service, but you wouldn’t need an operator to make a phone call. You could do it yourself, directly. Unfortunately, that revolution never happened.

I think this misses the mark just little. What was really compelling about SIP is that it gave us the hope that phone calls could work more like email. In fact, SIP addresses looked a lot like email address, e.g. sip:sales@sip.televolution.com. The issue of whether a service provider, or central server, was in the loop (or not) is really a red herring, IMHO. The point was that we could have a public address that was reachable directly from the Internet that could be used to call us, thus completely bypass the traditional PSTN (and telephone company carriers).

Unfortunately, that is what never happened - it’s not that P2P didn’t happen - it’s that (almost) no service providers offered publicly reachable SIP addresses to their end-user customers.

Instead, VoIP vendors used SIP behind the scenes only, and never exposed it to customers or to competitors the way Email services do. With email, a hotmail.com email address is public and a hotmail.com user can receive email from any other domain that supports the Internet Email protocols (standards). That didn’t happen with VoIP and SIP. The VoIP products like Vonage (and all Vonage copycats) built their system to use SIP to get the customers from the Internet to Vonage servers and to the old PSTN (existing telecom network), but not beyond. The old PSTN telecom network continued to be the only way to pass calls between providers. It would be as if hotmail.com refused to accept email from yahoo.com users via the Internet and instead delivered all inter-provider email using traditional postal mail (snail mail).

More importantly, these decisions as to what calls stay on the Internet, are controlled by the VoIP providers, not by VoIP end-users. End-users have no directly reachable VoIP address on the Internet, even though the Internet Standards exist for it (SIP) and in most cases these protocols were already being used internally by the providers, so it should have been easy to make them public.

I was writing about this as far back as 2003, such as:

There is the open standards based global SIP network, where like DNS or e-mail, everybody speaks the same protocols and can talk to each other, regardless of hardware or service provider… Services that do not support the global SIP-based VoIP network aren’t participating in the Internet. They are using the Internet as a pipe for their closed systems and getting in the way of progress toward making VoIP just one more interoperable application on the Internet. Whether a VoIP provider is using SIP ‘behind the curtains’ is irrelevent if it does not connect to the global SIP network.

Or Why AT&T, Quest, etc. VoIP announcements are lame among others.

In short, SIP’s problem has nothing to do with NAT or any technology aspect. It has to do with who funds what and, nobody has wanted to fund inter-provider VOIP. Likewise, grassroots efforts like FWD, Gizmo, and PhoneGnome, have not not succeeded in tickling the Internet’s fancy enough to get much viral traction.

Part of the problem is the difference in cost and speed between email and postal snail-mail was dramatic and clear. Even though email didn’t do that much new, it delivered messages much faster and cheaper (especially globally). VoIP has a similar appeal in terms of cost and, like email, that benefit is most noticeable to those making international calls. But as phone calls kept getting cheaper, the cost difference is more subtle with voice and therefore VOIP requires more “selling” than email did.

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Diversion: SF Giants 2008 HDTV games

For 2008, the San Francisco Giants TV rights were sold to NBC-11 (KNTV) and Comcast Sports Bay Area. The SF Giants site has a cool feature to download a CSV game schedule. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include data about TV or radio broadcasts and the broadcast schedule on the site doesn’t specify which games are Hi-def.

I combined data from the SF Giants site “broadcast schedule” and the Comcast Sports Net Bay Area “Giants HD schedule” to produce a list of all games planned to be broadcast in HD this year. It assumes NBC and FOX are available in hi-def.

Enjoy

Download CSV

Update Wednesday, June 18, 2008

DirecTV is changing the channels for three stations as of today:

Comcast SportsNet Bay Area: 696; CSNBA HD: 696-1; CSNBA Plus: 697

Unfortunately DirecTV’s on-line guide (and DVR guide for that matter) don’t keep these channels up to date so it’s a real pain in the neck to set up recording.

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Craigslist - Who do you love?

There has been an ongoing battle between spammers and Craigslist. More recently, VoIP bloggers like Dan York, Cory Andrews, and others took note of a thread on BroadbandReports.com discussing how Craigslist is preventing VoIP users from placing ads.

The blocking of VoIP and prepaid cell phone numbers by Craiglist points to the larger question of identity and trust on the Internet. There is no love between Craigslist and users.

1. Users don’t trust Internet sites with their private information, like email and phone numbers. And rightly so. Users are constantly bombarded with email, phone, and fax advertising - the last thing they want is to let their “real” email addresses and phone numbers leak out to yet more potential spammers. Therefore, users have valid reasons for wanting to give out disposable email addresses and disposable phone numbers.
2. Craigslist doesn’t trust users to behave. And rightly so. Fraud is rampant. Vendors and merchants of all kinds are overwhelmed by e-commerce fraud. It’s a much bigger problem than consumers, users, and the media appreciate. Therefore, Craigslist has a valid reason for identifying users.

It’s a question of accountability too. Both Craigslist and their (legitimate) users “share the love” of users being accountable for their actions. However, anonymity removes accountability - There is no “party of the first part” in the formal or informal contract between user and website.

Some people believe the solution is OpenID. Maybe. The problem is there is still a disconnect between the OpenID community and the commercial Internet e-commerce ecosystem - to the typical CFO, OpenID appears to be an “elitist” geek thing - not something for a conservative businessman to consider. Not enough sites support it - and even if they did, is an OpenID account really enough? Won’t spammers simply create “disposable” OpenID accounts too?

In the end, there are “good sites” (they don’t cause more spam for users) and “good users” (that don’t hack, spam, or steal). These good guys actually share common ground. The problem for both is identifying the good guys from the evil-doers. They both start from a position of “trust” that says “I trust that the other guy is an evil-doer until they prove me otherwise” - this is where they have to start because they have no history except “bad” history.

At one time, the Ebay trust mechanism based on reputation worked. I’m not a big Ebay user, but I’m told that it doesn’t work as well as it once did. There are scammers “buying” reputation there too and therefore diluting the value of “reputation” through this “feedback fraud”.

In short, this is a BIG problem - the kind the Internet, historically, has not been very good at fixing (like DNS, SMTP, NAT, IPv4 , the list goes on). The bad news is, by not fixing it, it invites government and “big corporate” to step in and fix it for us, or replace the open Internet with a closed “safe” one.

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