Dave and I are at ETel 2007, the Emerging Telephony Conference put on by O’Reilly, talking about the new voice features in Openfire and Spark. It has been great to meet many of the people who are working to change the voice and telephony landscape. There has been lots of buzz about Adhearsion, a Ruby library for use with Asterisk, and some very interesting demos at Launch Pad last night.
Like Matt discovered at the Internet Telephony Conference, the focus on telephony means that the discussions going on are very different than what we generally see in the IM community. I ran into this head on during my talk on XMPP and Jingle. The juxtaposition of Jingle and SIP came up front and center which lead to a great (if painful) discussion of both protocols. It struck me that it is easy to become myopic and that an open dialog going between protocol communities is very important. Reading Peter’s report on the great meetings that happened in Brussels further drove home the point that we have a great community with XMPP, but that as we move into other areas, like voice with Jingle, we need to make sure we clearly articulate the problems that we’re trying to solve, and the problems we are not trying to solve.
ETel will continue through Thursday afternoon and I’m looking forward to gaining a deeper appreciation for the problems faced in the telephony world. If you happen to be at the conference make sure to stop by and say hi.