1 – Microsoft lost big when it walked away empty-handed from Facebook, and Redmond’s been regretting it ever since.

2- Microsoft’s unexciting efforts in the music-business, including the Zune, may now have renewed hope, as MySpace is probably the only real 2.0 music destination on the web (iTunes is hardly a 2.0 destination; nice try Apple fans).

3 – Silverlight sucks and nobody wants it except Redmond.  Those page takeover ads for the next Batman movie that you see on MySpace occur courtesy of Flash, not Silverlight.  Of course, this won’t change that, either.

4 – MySpace is desperate to clean up its image as the red light district of social networking.  Who better than squeaky-clean Microsoft to bring a little much-needed legitimacy to the table?

5 – There are a greater percentage of Mac users on Facebook than on MySpace.  OK, I’m guessing here. But I bet there’s a pretty Mac-favorable ratio on the Facebook side that doesn’t exist on MySpace.

6 – Windows Mobile is late to the social networking party, and not fashionably so.  Hey, wait, what party ISN’T Windows Mobile late to?

7 – Microsoft would consider making an offer for MySpace, if it weren’t for the horrible fact that MySpace is the world’s largest ColdFusion abuser.  Eek, that’ll scare off a .Net dev in a hurry.

8 – MySpace’s Hold ‘Em poker apps are better than Facebook’s.  (It’s true.)

9 – Microsoft holds in very high regard the design ethic of MySpace (which looks like a 1998-era web site and always causes people to wonder where in the hell the link to edit a photo album is).

10 – MySpace still garners some undeniable clout, even if it’s with a segment of consumers that are less likely to have graduated college and more likely to still be rocking a Pentium 3.

Come on people!  The reason Obama was elected is this: 2x the “McCain’s a dud candidate” than “Obama for iPhone rocks”.   And people have long worked in groups to dissect social economics.  It’s called Economics 101–you might’ve even attended it yourself when you were in college. Churches and synagogues offer personal economics ministries–and so do tax planners, for that matter.

If we’re looking for shining examples of how social networking is going to change the world, are these really the ones we’re putting on a pedestal?   The article I linked to espouses admiration to people who do good things and get virtual karma points, all because of social networking.  A-hem.  Human decency doesn’t need Facebook.

We’re searching, it seems, for some greater purpose to social media. But why do we have to think we’re going to solve world hunger because of Web 2.0. Why can’t it just be fun?

Phone Boy has a snappy post up today.  He’s appreciating Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 while simultaneously blasting the same-old-same-old intellectual currents of the blogosphere.  While I’ve never read 451, I do agree with Phone Boy that the amount of original thought coming out of the blogosphere has diminished considerably.  It seems that this has occurred mostly since more people started blogging regularly.  Professional blogs, amateur blogs, good blogs and shitty ones.  From Engadget all the way down to the proverbial full-time mom earning income at home for three bucks a post, the blogosphere, and the Web 2.0 world at large, is filled with increasingly irrelevant voices.

And why are they irrelevant?  Because they’re all saying the same stuff.

At its start, Web 2.0 was uniquely set apart from Web 1.0 because it neither sold the user anything (ie. Amazon 1.0) nor tried to replace an offline product (ie. NYTimes.com 1.0).  No, Web 2.0 was mostly about using the collective of individual user opinion to democratize good ideas, and perhaps even to monetize those good ideas.  Often, those good ideas were just blog posts with fresh philosophy or some tidbit of revelation about technology or science.  Sadly, Web 2.0 moved away from that whole idea, and it’s devolved into a sort of commentary on the technology industry where every author claims to be an industry insider.  I liken it to a guy who plays great poker quitting in order to write about other poker players because it’s easier to write about them than to play against them, ie. easier to write than to THINK.

If the blog aggregators have told us one thing, it’s that we, as self-proclaimed industry insiders, mostly think alike.   Is there a fear of public scrutiny that keeps us from blasting each other on our blogs?  Or is it simply bad form to have a public debate any more?  I don’t seem to have a problem with taking people to task publicly. Maybe that’s because I don’t have a problem being taken to task myself.  In fact, I do it so much that I’ve been called a grump, picky, hypersensitve, overly critical, you name it.

Don’t care.

I appreciate those who adequately express their own isolated opinions, rather than piling on the prevailing dogma of the blogosphere at any given moment, blowing the wind of whatever current Online Weather System is buzzing through.  Honest, concrete expression of unique ideas is what’s missing from these buzz machines.  A prevailing concept blows through the blogosphere and gets just beaten absolutely to death by the Agreement Monster.

Critical thinking goes out the window and you get a chorus of two hundred 22-year-old part-time bloggers saying Cloud Computing is to file servers what file servers were to mainframes, each unaware, at first, that his contemporaries are all reporting the same “news” as gospel. By the time you’re done reading Techmeme’s top post on any given day, you’ve probably consumed 15 posts that agree whole-heartedly, 5 posts that have a keyword match on a tag but are either unrelated or one paragraph in length, and 1 or 2 posts of dissenting opinion.

In questioning the easy-to-hold points of view, I often sacrifice traffic.   And that’s OK, because at least I’m telling the truth.  I don’t usually post about something unless I’m passionate about it, compelled to write about it, because frankly, there are better ways to spend my time–helping clients, helping my kids with their homework, etc.–than writing my umpteenth Thesis of Ultimate Agreement with Blogger X or Blogger Y.   OK, if I agree with you, you’re less likely to hear from me on my blog.

That’s OK, there are thousands of others who agree with you.  And you’ll hear from them.   Because they want the traffic from blogs.com and Techmeme.  But how many times do you really need to read the same opinion?

With tradition comes a sense of comfort and rightness. But PC Magazine feels neither comfortable nor right about persisting with a print edition. Like the hood ornament, print zines may soon be just a luxury item.

Does this mean Time will go online-only?  Almost certainly not.  But the trade journals and vertical publications with a small circulation may be forced into an online-only format due to a number of reasons:

1 – There are just TOO MANY magazines out there.  In any given vertical, there are 3 or 4 magazines. Penton Media here in Cleveland publishes 40 or 50 vertical rags alone, many of which overlap each other in content.

2 – Demographic information about news consumption is easier for the publisher to obtain in an online format.

3 – Social media and the democratic web create “online weather systems” around news items, prevailing concepts, and fads.  It’s nearly impossible to catch a breeze from one of these online weather systems using print journalism.

4 – PCMag has already crossed over the “web revenue hump” that so many publishers struggle with even now.  With 70% of their brand’s revenue coming from the web, it’s pretty hard to argue in favor of keeping a costly print edition around to satisfy the old-timers.

5 – Blogging matters.  It used to be that print journalists, and in particular, newspaper folks, would dismiss bloggers as inaccurate, teeth-bearing, shit-stirring zealots.  As it turns out, many in the old media were of the same ilk.  Sometimes it hurts to look in the mirror.

6 – Community-based interests, be they purely cultural or geographic, are easier to satisfy using the web. Hyperlocalism in news coverage prevails on the web.  It’s what separates small, promising web publications like chroniclet.com from the behemoth one-size-fits all monsters like NYT.com.

Still, I’d rather read Time magazine that read a 5000-word piece on my iPhone.  I like my iPhone, but do I want to read that much on it?  No.

High school sports is a fantastic market opportunity for those in the media business, and that’s why I’m excited to be a part of LocoFan.net, a social networking and personal publishing platform being launched by one of my clients, LCPP Inc.   As you may’ve noticed, high school sports has garnered much attention from the new media lately, including launches of stats-oriented services like HighSchoolSports.net and PrepSportsNation.com.

These sites are great, but they stop short of empowering the social discourse surrounding sports that makes prep athletics so much fun: I’m talking about boosting, smack talking, Saturday-morning quarterbacking, and of course, media sharing.  Recognizing the opportunity to seize on the great hunger for high school sports social outlets, LCPP and I have been working together on LocoFan.net for the last six months or so.  We hope you’ll enjoy the result.

It’s part Facebook, part Typepad, and part Sports Page. We’ve put several core features into this service that give it a unique sports feeling, while leveraging the essentials of Web 2.0:

• Full-blown personal publishing platform with XMLRPC support, so it’s compatible with Live Writer, Twitter, Technorati, and other services that leverage remote posting / browsing.
• Photo sharing with galleries.
• Video hosting and sharing.
• “Fans”:  Instead of buddies or friends, the node relationship between users on LocoFan is not mutually exclusive (something I’ve always found frustrating about MySpace).  That is, you can become somebody’s “Fan” even if they choose not to be your fan.
• Integrated private e-mail style messaging.  All the anonymity. None of the spam.
• “Faves”:  Pick your favorite teams, and the LocoFan network uses your Faves in a number of cool ways. You can Team Tag any post, placing your favorite team’s color block on your posting, and aggregating the post into that team’s dynamically-generated home page.
• LocoRank: Think your team has the most fans?  Think again.  LocoFan ranks teams according to the amount of activity associated with each team via Team Tags, so bragging rights are never in doubt.
• Super-easy customizable theme for your LocoBlog.  Pick your team colors and favorite fonts, and LocoFan gives your blog a special customized look. We’ve even included over a dozen widgets that you can snap into your blog’s sidebar to further customize.
• Avatars with links to the user’s LocoBlog are integrated throughout the site, in comments, posts, the “featured LocoFans” section of the home page, private messaging, and in your “Fanbox”, the area of your LocoBlog where the world can see who you’re a fan of.

So visit LocoFan, which is now in public beta.  There’s something fresh and new here, and I would love to hear your feedback.

In his blog post, Bruce points out that, even though mainstream media folks, and often newspapers, like to point the finger of judgment at bloggers, leveling accusations of innacuracy and unprofessionalism.  Well, to the Plain Dealer’s chagrin, it turns out, they themselves made a “blogger mistake”.  Once again, a little irony goes a long way.

UPDATE: Tried it; don’t think it’s that exciting.  Might be better for heavy users of Google start page?  You tell me…

Ken Camp is a pioneer in our industry. His name invokes respect and perhaps even envy among his peers, myself included.  The guy wrote one of the very first books about the relevance of IP Telephony in the enterprise, “IP Telephony Demystified”. This book was my first resort when fact-checking my own first VoIP book, “Switching to VoIP”, and a book I still thumb through regularly.   Aside from the book, Ken has been an active and visible proponent of the VoIP technology family through his IP Adventures and Realtime Unified Communications blogs.  Nutshell: he’s a thought leader, and you should listen to him.

Today, he told us that Unified Communications and Web 2.0 are, in effect, the same thing.

This is my attempt to respond to this thoughtful postulation. Earlier in the week, some other people in the blogosphere surmised that business VoIP still hasn’t “happened”, that it never really arrived, and that much of the hype over Unified Communications was exactly that–hype. Here’s what Ken quoted, a passage from Eric Krapf:

A debate has been going on over at No Jitter about whether enterprises are actually adopting Unified Communications [...]. I tend toward the skeptical end of any conversation about how widely a hot new technology is actually being adopted, but I do see a few signs that enterprises are at least paying attention and, where possible, looking for an opportunity to get their feet wet.

Now Eric’s understanding of UC is tainted right in this quote, as he describes it has a “hot new technology”, when, in reality, UC has been past the point of emergence for the last 3 years or so.  The adoption curve, among enterprises, has surpassed the point of majority, somewhere in late 2006 or early 2007.  So UC isn’t exactly hot or new. UC capabilities and infrastructure exist in every Fortune 500(0) company in the U.S.  So the question isn’t whether or not it’s here. The question is: is the infrastructure getting used?

It’s getting used within the enterprise, but not in the massive, global manner that the underpinnings of the technology encourage. I have a few theories as to why this is the case.

I would characterize UC not as a hot new technology, but as an evolving, suppressed, political hot potato that many vendors (i.e. Cisco, Avaya, Nortel) have acknowledgingly hobbled by:

- Reducing the opportunities presented intrinsically in VoIP protocols and apps by forcing them to work in a static outmoded framework of hard phones, voicemail, and decidely “1.0″ telephony feature sets. All the excitement folks had about UC has been boiled back down to the basics because of the limits placed on VoIP by big vendors. They go around (still) saying “SIP isn’t ready for prime time” and “Asterisk isn’t ready for prime time” and “T.38 isn’t ready for prime time” and all this other BS that is a complete buzzkill.  It’s reminiscent of the Microsoft FUD of the early and mid 1990s.

- Capitulating to the phone companies’ legacy infrastructure offerings rather than insisting on an end-to-end IP network, which is what we all envisioned 5 years ago when we were writing VoIP books, when I was so full of vigor and optimism.  Instead, the phone companies still run 80% of their enterprise services the way they always did, on copper-infested last-miles that don’t run Internet Protocol except as a means of routing third-party IP packets out to the Net.  Ask your SMB account rep for  delivery of end-to-end VoIP in a place like Cleveland, OH, and you’re likely to get the deer in the headlights glare. Trust me, I gave up on it.

So, in some ways, I agree that the hype was just hype.  But, sadly, it’s the fault of the equipment vendors. I blame Cisco for not pushing VoIP into the end-to-end arena, because they earn money on VoiP using seat licenses, the vast bulk of which occur on the customer premise, not at the C.O.  So the big revenue opportunity for a Cisco lies in converting the customer side of the demarc into VoIP while leaving the Bell side at large basically unchanged.

Me–I’m a consultant, and in the end, I often tell SMB customers not to bother with VoIP until the interconnect situation changes. When 75% of the country can’t even get SIP trunks, let alone end-to-end IP without spending an arm and a leg on MPLS services, what’s the point of converting the customer premise to VoIP?  So my clients are given the good advice to wait.  One of them has an AltiGen TDM system. It still has click-to-call, heads-up-display, and all that cool stuff you used to only see on VoIP PBX systems, but because Bell has taken too long to IP-ify their local networks, the TDM vendors caught up with the VoIP featureset and pretty much leveled the playing field.

NOTE: If this sounds like “news to you”, it’s because you’re on the west coast of California, where all the phone companies offer good service, and IP is everywhere.  Not so here in the Midwest. Read on.

Now that I’m done ripping the telcos a new one, let’s talk about what Ken is saying (sorry; the phone company stuff always slips out).

Ken makes a salient point when he talks about the third phase of unified communication’s emergence:

This convergence of voice and data networks has continued around the globe for the past several years. Today there are many networks that still haven’t fully converged. The process continues, and for many companies, the end of the road is nowhere in sight.

Note the part where Ken says “for many companies, the end of the road is nowhere in sight.”  These companies Ken refers to, often times (in my opinion) are the telecommunications carriers who seem to exist with one objective in mind: revenue protection as opposed to innovation.  To find out where the end of THAT road goes, take a look at the current Apple/Google/Microsoft dynamic.  The revenue protector is losing and losing big ground, while the innovators are developing NEW revenue, the elusive holy grail of every institutionalized business. (Question: how do we, MegaCorp Inc., attract new revenue? Answer: Offer something NEW, DUH….)

Then, Ken poses this question:

In the Information Week piece, Krapf asks is anyone actually implementing UC? I’d rephrase it differently – Is there anyone who isn’t implementing UC?

I would funnel this question slightly so that it reads, “Is there anyone who isn’t implementing VoIP?”

And the answer is a resounding yes. Plent of folks aren’t using VoIP, because the unique advantages of Voice over IP have evaporated in the vacuum of carrier inaction. The dirty little secret is that UC has evolved in SPITE of voice over IP, not by leveraging its technological advantages.  Sure, there are cousins of the VoIP technology family throught UC and throughout Web 2.0: click-to-call, unified CRM contact center solutions, Grand Central and the like, etc.  But VoIP wasn’t the unanimous cornerstone of UC many of us predicted it to be.

Sure, VoIP has its niches. The customer side of the prem in a greenfield build, for example. Or the “free app service” niche. VoIP is now often thought of as a best-effort glue-in solution for entrepreneurs who want to offer some service for FREE.  FREE and VoIP go together like peas and carrots.  But all these things are peripheral to the practice of UC.  VoIP is always thought of as a solution item or a tactical measure, not an infrastructure item or a strategic investment. Here’s what I mean.

Ask a Microsoft guy what VoIP means and he’ll immediately think of something like, “the method in which an OCS gateway connects Microsoft’s conferencing server to the outside world or trunks calls over to an Avaya TDM switch. Ask an appservice provider what he thinks VoIP means and he’ll think of “the way I deliver service to my customer without them having to pay the local Bell.”  Ask a Cisco PBX guy what he thinks VoIP means and he’ll tell you something like, “it’s the way IP phones communicate with the CallManager.”

Sure, all these things are true, but an awareness of the greater point of VoIP is missing from the equation. Roll back to 2004, when I was working on the first book.  Here was a protocol family that could handle ALL modes and legs of telecommunication, from the customer prem to the switching infrastructure to the long distance to the automation. 100% IP. 100% software. Yet the phone companies would rather complain about the “newness” of the SIP RFC than slap a $300 gateway card into their local CO to handle a customer’s need to do SIP trunking.  That KILLED VoIP as a strategic factor on the global network. I’ll give you an example. A 500-line call center like TeleTech in Amherst, OH, isn’t going to benefit from end-to-end VoIP because the cruddy local telco and other like it around the country make true end-to-end convergence impossible.  Why invest in the infrastructure when the telcos won’t unlock the doors that make VoIP work end-to-end?  Imagine the advantages of an all IP global telecom network from layer 3 on up!!

So the ubiquity of VoIP never happened.  The ubiquity of UC, on the other hand happened and happened HUGE. And this is what I understand Ken’s main point to be:

Without unified communications, you have no social media – no Facebook, no Twitter, no comprehensive integration. Without unified communications, the web as we know it is a pipe dream. It had email and static web pages.

The emergence of good frameworks for telecom to web interaction has enabled an incredible convergence of (non-VoIP) personal devices and web sites, and this has happened AMAZINGLY fast.  Faster than I would’ve thought. And it’s all IP-based, for the most part. Even service delivery over cellular data networks has gone the way of IP, years ahead of the copper carriers.  This, combined with the creativity and hippy mentality of the web, has resulted in an incredible combustion of business energy and social connectedness.

Then, Ken hits a home run with this passage:

Web 2.0, the phrase we’ve all heard a million times is unified communications. Without UC, there could have been no Web 2.0. Unified communications, like VoIP, isn’t a product you write a check for and buy. It’s not a single product you implement and move on. It’s not as complex as vendors make it sound.

By saying that UC and Web 2.0 are the same thing, what Ken suggests is that UC isn’t confined to the enterprise as popular opinion would state.  When you log on to MySpace from your iPhone, you’re UCing. When you receive SMS directions from Google Maps, you’re UCing. When you geotag, you’re UCing. When your blog post is picked up by Google News through RSS, you’re UCing.  Koom-bah-yah already.

I also like how Ken wrote that VoIP isn’t a product you write a check for and buy. Ken is too smart to let the marketeers redefine the “there’s nothing I can’t do” nature of VoIP for their own vertical purposes.  VoIP is a technology family that has yet to come into its own, due largely to the big carriers’ refusal to embrace it, even as they sit on panels at VONs and ITExpos and extol its coming of age.

Think about what Ken said about the explosion of UC through Web 2.0. Now, imagine the whole global telecom service palette, public and private, end-to-end, was IP-based. Imagine what THAT would do for UC.

Make sure you listen to Ken’s Stardust Radio episode on the 21st at 9pm EST.  He and many of us will be tossing these ideas around.  Gosh I feel like a VoIP zealot.  VoIP is dead. Long live VoIP. Etc.

Note: The Talkshoe site was down so I didn’t give a link to Stardust Radio. Check Ken’s page for the deets.