Happy

• Gus is pleased with the AIM 6.1 Beta 3 (Version 6.1.31.1) release. Bug fixes, full screen video. The net installer, the full installer.

Integrated

• The Microsoft Open Communication Server 2007 beta is now available for general download. via Irwin Lazar. 

Surprised

• The VoIP Girl hears back from Skype customer service after two weeks and is surprised. "Better late than never I guess. Honestly, whenever I fill in one of those web forms, I'm sure I'm sending my question into a black hole. I didn't expect Skype to get back to me, but they did. So, if you're not in any kind of hurry, go ahead and ask away." Skype is just part of Leanne Tremblay's VoIP toolkit.

Curious

• Johannes Ernst: Call for Papers for the November 2007 ACM CCS2007 Workshop on Digital Identity Management: "Usability Issues for Identity Management." The questions raised should make for a great workshop.  

Experienced

• Chad Danylko asks Does Instant Messaging Really Keep Us in Touch? Loving the small stuff of life with close friends; not so much for mere acquaintances and strangers. Good thing Chad hasn't tried twitter. via the great iMessenger blog.

Worldly

• Globalization - the Killer App for VoIP. "The ability to facilitate an easier transition to a coherent global telephony environment may be one of the hidden benefits of VoIP that makes a real difference to companies." on TelecomVistas 

Annoyed

• Alec Saunders doesn't like interruptions to his flow state, despite Stowe Boyd's defense of continuous partial attention. I'll have to get back to reading that sometime, but first... Alec also argues for one world price for software. Not even a sliding scale for developing countries?

Activated

• Ken Camp calls for Americans to join Free Conferencing Corp's class action suit against big telcos. "If you're concerned about your carrier dictating to whom you may place calls, in essence censoring your ability to use the PSTN, I encourage you to follow the link and get more information"

Tired

• Jon Arnold gives 8 reasons VoIP has peaked. And he's not speaking of Skype.

Cute

• Jon also walks through DiamondWare's 3D audio. I'm less sure their spatialization (placing sounds around the user to match up with a virtual world) will scale well given the complex acoustics and number of rapidly changing sources in gamespaces. The proof will be in the gameware and alliances.

Cuter

• Bluedude shows the Shotcode demo that embeds an url into a picture. Snap the pic with your mobile camera and it takes you to the site.

Cutest

• James Seng defines an IM Phone product spec. Email is to Blackberry as IM is to... A phone designed for VoIM would have more heat, but would cost more.

Confused

• FierceVoIP: Skype/PayPal tie-up a recipe for disaster.

  "My gut reaction to this news is that it's something bad just waiting to blow up, but I can't honestly say why. ... I'm not sure that being able to send quantities of money to points unknown with a single mouse click--let alone from an online account with links to my credit cards and bank accounts--is a good thing. And with the terrible reputation for arrogant and non-responsive customer service that eBay, Skype, and PayPal have all earned, I've got to believe that linking Skype and PayPal accounts is like putting a match to a dangerous fuse."

Sellable

• Rich Tehrani on the Asterisk Appliance. I'm pretty sure this is the kind of thing Jan Geirnaert wants from Skype. Something tangible, simple to understand, with enough margins that local resellers can both rep it and support it.

Paranoid

• Skype's current Extras Manager, used to download, licence, launch, and update Skype Extras, can use more than 20MB of memory. Skype licensed it from a third party, so you not only trust Skype, you trust its licenser and each plug-in developer. At this time, Skype only warrants that its own software is free of viruses, spyware, and malware; not the extras in its gallery. If this freaks you out (it doesn't keep me up at night) what can you do?
  
  Skype loads the Extras Manager automatically, but you can always turn off its skypePM.exe process in Windows' Task Manager. If that's too hard, Jan Geirnaert's friend wrote a utility to kill the Extras Manager process. Then again, who knows if that utility has viruses, spyware or malware?