Status-Q

Want to be an anonymous police informer, or call somebody and demand a ransom? SpoofCard.com lets you choose the caller-ID that appears on the destination phone, and can also modify your voice… I see a whole new life of crime stretching out before me, starting at just $10…

I’m getting more and more fond of Gizmo. If you haven’t met it, Gizmo is very similar to Skype, but based on open standards. It hasn’t always got Skype’s firewall-traversing capabilities and sound quality, but it’s pretty close, getting better all the time, and in some ways is nicer to use.

It’s hard to argue with Skype’s 60M registered users, though, 6M of whom are typically online at any one time, and I use and like Skype too. So why do I think Gizmo is important?

It’s because I see a fairly clear analogy here between Skype and the walled-garden approaches of online systems such as AOL in the past. David Beckemeyer made this point in his e-Tel talk; AOL could never hire enough people to compete with the innovation happening on the internet, and in the end they had to let their customers out of the garden. Skype is in the same position, and they are smart enough that they must know this. In fact, they may even be using AOL as their model: start closed, get a few million on board, and then open things up when you’ve built a big enough brand.

In the meantime, most of the innovation in telephony is happening around Asterisk, which is to telephony what Apache is to the web. Everything that happened with text and graphics in the early days of the web is starting to happen now with voice. I can do all sorts of really fun stuff with the Asterisk server I have at home, and the e-Tel conference has been full of other people doing other fun stuff with it.

But I cannot connect to it using Skype, not without paying, anyway, and it cannot connect to my Skype session. Gizmo, on the other hand, is perhaps the Netscape/Mozilla of this new world, and I can do so much more with it. I have UK phone numbers which will forward to my Gizmo session here in California. For free. I can use Gizmo to call up my Asterisk server and listen to MP3 files and podcasts stored on my hard disk. For free. I can connect directly to Google Talk, or to dedicated VoIP phones. For free. Some of this I would have to pay for with Skype – much of it I could not do at all.

The Skype guys deserve their success, for showing people that VoIP works, and can work well, and doesn’t have to be complicated. But as with the web, open standards will win in the end, and keywords like SIP, IAX, Asterisk and XMPP are the ones to watch out for if you want to see the next big thing coming.

From Jeff Bonforte’s talk this morning:

“There are more people in the US with rotary phones than with Vonage accounts.”

Apparently there are over a million people with rotary phones (and still paying for them on a monthly basis).

A Business Week article suggesting that email’s role is… well… if not superseded then at least diminishing rapidly.

I think rumours of its death have been somewhat exaggerated. But as my spam filters, of necessity, become ever more stringent, so I have to spend more time reading the logs to check for unjustified rejections. There may well be scope for wider adoption of an email model where, by default, no messages are allowed, and you have to contact me in person and get a code before I can receive any messages from you…

Still, the gist of this article is that email’s often not a very efficient way to communicate, and they may be right there.

Protopage is really very impressive. With this, and Writely, and GMail, and Google Maps and so forth, the in-browser experience is becoming amazingly rich. There will be a viable Open Source desktop environment after all. And it will be called Firefox.

Interesting question… At present, more than half of the machines sold are laptops, because people are getting more and more mobile and they really want their data with them everywhere. Will we ever see a reversal of this trend, as less and less of our data is stored on our own machines and it becomes accessible from anywhere? Will we see a ‘desktop PC’ renaissance?

OK, so this is a quick test using Xinha Here, a rather neat Firefox add-on which gives you WYSIWYG html editing in any text-edit box.  Quite sweet if you end up creating HTML posts, for example for your blog, and you do it through the browser.  I like it. 

I’m using Firefox more and more now, but it still hasn’t quite replaced Safari as my main browser on the Mac.  There are just too many convenient drag-and-droppy-type things you can do with Safari.  It may only be a matter of time, though. Here are the current stats:

I’ve just been reading a thoroughly enjoyable book on web site design. It comes from the creator of the CSS Zen Garden, a wonderful site which I first mentioned here nearly three years ago.

The idea of the Garden was to promote standards-based web design and, in particular, to show people what could be done with CSS in an age when most people were using tables for all their layout and embedding <font> tags in their HTML. And so the site became a showcase for a single web page – a single page of HTML, that is – but rendered in hundreds of different ways simply by changing the CSS and the associated graphics. The HTML remains unchanged. Have a quick look at
this,
this, and
this, for example. The designs are generally carefully tailored to this particular page, and wouldn’t always work for a whole site, but it’s still a great resource and inspiration for any web designer.

And now David Shea, who created the site, and Molly E. Holzschlag have written The Zen of CSS Design, which looks at 36 of the designs and talks through, in very readable language, what we can learn about design, and what we can learn about CSS, from each of them. This is not a book for CSS beginners, but if you know the basics it comes very highly recommended.

I now want to go and redesign all my web sites. Oh, for some time….

Let’s hope the government isn’t either.
Bill Thompson’s blog entry on the newly-launched ‘Creative and Media Business Alliance’.

A nice post about ambiguous domain names.

It only took me about 4 years to discover this, but ColorMatch is a very handy utility if you’re designing a website. Or redecorating. Thanks to Steven T for the link.

There are some other interesting ones out there, like ColorCombos, which can grab the colors from a web site and then let you play with them.