Communications 2.0 backplane

Currently there is no functional voice communications backplane on the web. Google tried with GoogleTalk but the lack of service interworking with the regular telephone network and the existing limitations of libjingle limit the usefulness of recombined voice service applications based on GoogleTalk beta.

Yahoo! has just launched Yahoo! Messenger with Voice 7.0 with broader support for PC to phone calling. This service offers even cheaper per minute rates than SkypeOut as noted by Stuart Henshall of Skype Journal. With extensive network cores, Yahoo!, Google, and other leading web portals are in pretty good positions to establish themselves as competing communications backplanes. I would suspect that over time, Yahoo, Google / AOL, Microsoft Live, and possibly ...Skype will all offer varying capabilities of a communications 2.0 backplane.

IMS (Internet Multimedia Subsystem) has been many years in the making starting with 3GPP R5. IMS too can be a backplane and its supporters now argue that IMS walled gardens can be extended beyond telecom operators. With online portals pushing communities and telecom operators pushing convergence, between the two opposite ends are a set of services applications that extend communities to telecom networks. It will be these service applications that make the communications backplane and telecom service convergence more relevant.