Reality Check: Use the Skype Client for Real Time Conversations
Facebook is no nirvana for VoIP services; six month total Facebook VoIP installations = 1.5 days' of Skype account registrations.
A real life Skype Conference Call experience: Last Friday, a situation arose while talking to a vendor in the Toronto area where I needed to introduce into the call a prospect at her office in San Diego, who, in turn, asked me to add a colleague on her Blackberry in San Francisco. For a variety of reasons, while all three participants had Skype accounts, at this point in time, all three were most readily accessed via the PSTN (requiring SkypeOut to all three parties). To add the San Diego and San Francisco contacts to my initial SkypeOut call I simply went to the "Add Callers" menu item in my active Call tab, entered each phone number and clicked on the Start button. In each case the addition to the Skype conference call was completed in less than a minute, required no additional action on the part of the party being added and we could focus on the business discussion at hand.
Bottom line: dead easy simple!
- Totally an ad hoc call.
- No conference call operators, no call back,
- No dialing into a central conferencing switch (with potential for long distance charges)
- No action required by the other participants other than to answer their ringing phones.
- No cost! (I am on the North America Unlimited Plan.).
- Technology transparent to the call.
- And achieved our business objective for the call.
In summary: An excellent user experience.
So what's the future for VoIP on Facebook?
Over the past few days lots has been written about the adoption of VoIP applications on Facebook. Launched by a link post from Stuart Henshall, Alec Saunders has elaborated with some statistics, and Jon Arnold has discussed. Om, in On Facebook, VoIP Has a Sore Throat, has the most interesting statistics provided by Ryan Nitz, CTO of Deft Labs, publisher of AppHound.
When Nitz ran queries using the keywords Skype and VoIP, AppHound found that the combined installs for all VoIP applications was 435,481, with 11,615 daily users. That’s about 2.7 percent. (See chart for the full breakdown.)
Check out the table in Om's post: CallMe on Skype leads with 110,650 of those "installs"; SkypeMe, under 4,000.
But here are some Skype numbers that put the whole picture in perspective:
- Daily Skype account additions: 292,000
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Skype Extra downloads: 288,819 (week of Nov. 1 -14, 2007).
- and almost 23 million downloads in 11 months.
- Number of Skype Users Online at 0900h EST (1400h GMT) Nov. 20, 2007
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Total number of Canadians on FaceBook: 7.8 million
- 23.4% of Canadian population
HighSpeedConferencing had over 12,800 downloads last week; according to Alec's post referenced above FREE Conference Calls (which is not a VoIP application) on Facebook just passed 20,000 installations after almost three months. FREE Conference Calls is doing one service: introducing the concept of multi-party calls to a largely consumer audience. And they are generating some revenue but I use SkypeOut to call at no charge into FREE Conference Call sessions.
After losing his patience and making a few brief but succinct comments, Thomas Howe has gone back to writing his clients' mashups for enterprise applications:
I’m not going to dispute the numbers, but apparently, about six months after the Facebook API was made public, we’ve been through a complete market cycle. VoIP apps are failing on facebook, so it’s time to pack it in and call it a day. You would have to be a complete fool to waste your time there, no? Of course you would. There can’t be anymore than, say, 100k installs of Facebook voice apps to date, ....
Well, Thomas, it's only the "CallMe on Skype" app that's gone over 100,00 downloads but a total of 400,000 in six months is agreeably pathetic. Thomas' conclusion: "Six months is enough for a gazillion, right? Because that’s the way it is in any market… it fully develops in six months"
Further comments in a follow-up post; it's all about the user experience. And what platform is getting user traction for Voice 2.0 application developers?
Memo to VC's listening to Facebook VoIP application financing proposals: don't read this post.
Tags: VoIP, Facebook, Skype, Skype Conference Call, Alec Saunders, Jon Arnold, GigaOm, Thomas Howe, Skype Extras, High Speed Conferencing, FREE Conference Calls
Comments
I can't agree more. Want to know why my company hasn't released a click to call button for Facebook yet ?
Posted by: luca | November 21, 2007 09:56 AM
Maybe this conversation about VoIP applications is "mis-framed". Perhaps its not about "who wants to call someone else using SNP as an initiation or termination point", but "what are SNP's actually used for and how can the surfacing of new granularities of data create requirements for new types of communication and interaction". With a couple of massive "tweaks" beacon might actually work, but it is destined to fail right now, that's a $15bn failure from some pretty smart people. Yet, clearly, the opportunity for people to "signal" through "purchasing" as a "social object", combined with active "reviewing, ranking, and rating", have the potential to be highly influential in the future. The present conceptualisation of VoIP apps are just early iterations, but something tells me that combining multi-modal and beacon could in itself be compelling. early days. early days.
Posted by: PaulSweeney | November 22, 2007 02:26 AM