Om Malik on Broadband talks about Gizmo 3.0
“The company claims that it is the first VoIP software client to tie multiple popular VoIP networks. Gizmo Project 3.0 include real-time file sharing which users to exchange files with other Gizmo Project 3.0 users, or send files directly to any major Jabber client.
To make a call, users simply type the username or ID of the person they want to call plus the network domain, for example, username@yahoo.com or username@hotmail.com. Gizmo Project 3.0 users can also call international Yahoo Messenger users for free in France, Spain, and many other countries, for example username@yahoo.fr or username@yahoo.es.”
Why is this not the way that all things work? Why have we had to wait so long?
Why is AIM/iChat not on the list?
I agree, Markus, it could be better but I don’t see any of the BIG NAMES trying to fix things here. And the fact it’s a small company just makes it all the more shocking.
Shame on you, big companies with an empire to retain!
It finally works for real because it’s based on open standards like Jabber and SIP. It doesn’t work with legacy chat services like AIM and MSN because they’re proprietary systems. They’re doomed to die like aol, genie, and compuserve died when real mail got popular.
Peter, I think that’s a silly political point of view. The protocols will be forced to open. It’s just a matter of time and rhetoric about “legacy” and “proprietary” is a little daft and technically incorrect. AIM, for example, uses SIP. MSN also.
You can’t argue “proprietary”, the old chat networks belong to a single company, speak a protocol of their own invention, are hosted on their servers, and run at their whim. I call them “legacy” because they’re going to die. Proprietary islands of service all die, it’s just a matter of how long they get before an open standard comes along and creates a market.
Think of the companies that died when standardized mail and hypertext came along: AOL, Compuserve, GEnie, Delphi, The SOURCE, Prodigy, the original MSN, Quantum Link, AppleLink, Tymnet, ImagiNation, Compunet, and dozens of companies that provided services on their networks. The few that managed to stay in business did so by scrambling onto the open standards.
Oh, come on Peter, that’s revisionism! The biggest issue in the past has been with the interoperability of open standards. SIP has been a complete bollocks in the past for interoperability and don’t get me started on the interoperability of the IPSec standards.
When these “closed networks” use open protocols such as SIP and start to interoperate (as in Yahoo and MSN) then we see compelling solutions. Compare iChat A/V to anything available in the open source world. For video quality, nothing open source or using open standards even comes close.
I’m all for open protocols. Big fan. Being a Mac guy I have to be. But this rhetoric is the same rhetoric that promises that THIS YEAR will be the year for Linux. Which we should know by now is hyperbole.
While Gizmo lets users call from the Gizmo client on their PC, Talkster has extended this to the mobile phone in support of its belief that users shouldn’t have to sit in front of a computer to make VoIM calls. So for the last 6-months, Talkster users with an ordinary mobile phone (no PC or broadband required), have been able to call their Google Talk, Gizmo and MSN buddies from anywhere.
See my blog post on the topic here: http://talkster.wordpress.com/2007/03/02/gizmo-aggregates-voice-over-im-just-like-talkster/