When I worked at 3Cube nearly ten years ago, we helped design one of the most feature-rich and well-designed online conference calling and Web meeting products out there, with a service we called PhoneCube. You could, from your Web browser, initiate a conference call to up to 32 participants, and manage the entire conference, including putting people on mute or hold, from your Web browser. You could also invite them, on the fly, to a Web meeting, and share a presentation or your desktop. But as a small startup, we ran into two major issues. The first was that WebEx had raised scads of money and was spending tens of millions on marketing, including a Super Bowl ad featuring RuPaul. The second was that pricing the product, no matter how we did it, seemed expensive, as users were not comparing our 15 or 25 cents per minute per line rates with that of traditional conference call services, but instead, with the pennies on the dollar VoIP alternative, Net2Phone.


The old PhoneCube.com Web site, Circa 2000 (via archive.org)
Rising in the era of Napster and Web browser bars, like AllAdvantage, that promised to pay you money just for surfing the Web, Net2Phone's dirt cheap, but awful quality, got significant use, especially for those folks making international calls - many of whom thought we should drop our rates to basement levels found only online or on gift cards picked up from 7-11. And thus were my feelings cemented about what this cheap PC to landline connection represented. So you can imagine my hesitancy when it comes to Skype.

After finally giving in and getting a Skype account last year, to participate in the occasional podcasts, I have dealt with frequent bugs that have me wondering if the Skype application has a personal grudge against me thanks to our history. Whether I have participated on the ReadBurner Weekly podcast, the FFundercats podcast, or yesterday, when I was a guest on This Week In Tech with Leo Laporte, I always get dropped, without warning, around 20 minutes into the call, like clockwork.

And I hate looking like a tech fool. My Mac is up to date in just about every respect. I have the latest version of Skype downloaded. I have a headset which works. But regardless of what time of day or who I'm talking to, I know that I should keep my calls to 15 minutes, or you can expect me to have to dial in about 3 to 4 times an hour. (See yesterday's TWIT, episode 194 for a great example)

So, community of Skypers... you tell me. Should I relegate Skype into the same bucket of ugly 1999 quality Net2Phone, or should I give it another try? Is it my fault? Is it Comcast (my ISP)? Or is it Skype? Reasonable responses and suggestions will be tried.

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Facebook/FriendFeed)

A little while back Louis shared the importance of not holding a grudge, encouraging the LouisGray.com readers to try to maintain relationships regardless of any blips that may occur during that relationship. Twitter just released an API which, if you're one to hold grudges, could rub it in a little further through applications which choose to use it.
Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Guest blog post from Jason Goldberg, Chief Product Officer at XING & founder of socialmedian

Hi everyone! Remember me? It has been quite a while since Jason Goldberg or socialmedian graced the blog-o-louisgray ... been waiting until I actually had something interesting to say.

Last year was quite a ride for me and for socialmedian. What started off in January of 2008 as an idea around social-graph-filtered-news rapidly became a website (launched on louisgray.com) that gained a die-hard following amongst the social media early-adopters. socialmedian was also one of the first companies to embrace distributed social media, integrating with Facebook, Twitter, and pioneering news-streaming as a form of life-streaming. Election 2008 propelled socialmedian, growing traffic to the site by 300% thanks to partnerships with the likes of the Washington Post and The Guardian. As it became clearer that socialmedian might have a future as a compliment to a larger network, Louisgray.com predicted an early exit for socialmedian. IMO the coolest part of the socialmedian story in 2008 was building the site with our users, conducting a public dialogue with users on what we should do next, and then each week launching new features based on direct user input. “Tweet what you think we should do next” is the new way to build software.

And then, almost as quickly as we came onto the scene, socialmedian was acquired by XING, Europe's professional networking leader.

The XING acquisition was announced in December 2008 and then closed in February 2009. Since then, I have been working fulltime at XING as the company's Chief Product Officer. And while I’ve surely kept up on Twitter, I haven’t had much time for blogging and also haven’t spent much time pimping socialmedian in the blogosphere as we’ve been very focused on getting some new projects going with XING. XING is really committed to being a leader in the next phase of the evolution of social media and it's really fun to be part of that effort. It's also really cool for me to be working for XING in Hamburg, Germany, and for a brash American social media dude to be impacting and influencing the growth and globalization of a European internet leader.

So, what does all this mean for socialmedian? What happens when a little website like socialmedian gets gobbled up by a XING? Does socialmedian have a future with XING?

One of the key projects I have been working on since I got to XING has been implementing the open-social platform on XING. This will enable XING and its partners to rapidly launch rich applications which enrich the XING user experience by tapping into the social-graph of relationships on XING.

I'm thrilled to announce that 3 months after XING closed the deal to acquire socialmedian, we just went live with two socialmedian-built applications on XING. The first beta testers now have access to the apps, which will distribute virally on XING. One, XING News, is a social news service in German, English, Spanish, and Turkish languages. It is basically socialmedian on XING, enabling XING members to get news filtered by their XING contacts, share stories of interest, discuss/comment, etc. The second is ASK Xing, which enables XING members to ask questions and get answers from the XING network. Both were built on the open-social framework which we are also launching Monday. We are going to start with these two socialmedian-team-built apps, and then in the following weeks launch several partner applications, of which we have many in testing now.

Click for a Full Size Version of The New XING

Click for a Full Size Version of XING News
As noted, XING News is essentially socialmedian on XING. We've adapted the socialmedian application to the XING environment and enabled it to operate in the German, English, Spanish, and Turkish languages. In doing so, we've immediately gone from thousands of users for socialmedian per day to millions of users interacting with socialmedian, which is about as cool as it gets when you're in the business of building consumer web apps, like we are! XING News now enables XING members to get the news filtered by their XING contacts. Find out which stories your XING contacts find interesting. Comment and join in discussions...all the social media bells and whistles you would expect, with much more on the way. socialmedian will continue to operate as a standalone website but with XING News, we’ve now taken socialmedian to a whole new level.

Click for a Full Size Version of XING in German

Click for a Full Size Version of Ask XING
I know that most of the readers of LouisGray.com aren’t all that familiar with XING, but I hope you will respect that this Germany-based professional networking leader is making a big social media commitment and that a big pillar of that commitment is from a company that got started here at louisgray.com.

Peace, big love and Auf Wiedersehen!
- Jason Goldberg

Catch more from Jason Goldberg at The socialmedian blog or on Twitter.

Last week, whether it was big news or not, depending who you ask, Twitter finally got around to improving the notifications it sends users when they gain new followers. Rather than a basic text note linking to the person's profile, the update displayed HTML content and included background on the individual, including their follower and following counts as well as updates. It was largely seen as being in response to third party services that have been doing similar functions for months, including Topify, which I use and discussed in March.


Topify's older notifications have simplified subject lines.

The new Topify updates contain follower statistics.
Topify, who seemed pleased that Twitter is starting to follow their functionality, stealthily added a tweak to their own notifications today, changing the subject line to show not just the user's name, but also their Twitter handle and followers/following counts. For those people who might be getting a ton of notifications, or who don't want to click through each e-mail to get the pertinent data, this might be a time saver. Alternatively, it could be a simple update for update's sake. Either way, it still keeps Topify ahead of Twitter's native offering.

Also keeping Topify ahead of Twitter's standard (though improved) e-mails is that you can perform actions directly from the message. You can hit reply to automatically follow back, or on direct message alerts, you can hit reply to send the user a DM yourself. You can even forward the message to [email protected] if you just want the user to disappear. In contrast, Twitter instead only offers the ability to click through to a profile.

The ecosystem being built around Twitter is an interesting one, and each little tweak helps.