Too many people think that SIP = VoIP. Then some say: hey, what about video?! But most people stop there.
So, the consequence is that the blog world on VoIP now is starting to question whether the steam has run out of VoIP. Thomas Anglero blogs about this in Telecom’s Tsunami. However, as I wrote to him in a private email:
“I have been looking forward to this. Let the tourists go home and the real innovation begin…
I touched on this in my post:
http://sipstuff.ttwedel.no/2007/02/competing-eco-systems-ims-ser-asterisk.html
but I didn’t write about the basic tenet underlying why I bother: That SIP together with established web-technologies is the missing real-time, two-way communication layer required to move Web 2.0 beyond the mini-apps we see today and towards the web as a real-time network of small web applications communitating and acting on behalf of users. That SIP was used to implement VoIP is good because it gets the traction, but VoIP is just a small piece of what SIP soon will do.”
I realized that my comments to Thomas belonged here on the blog. So, all SIP people out there, get started innovating using SIP without VoIP, think sessions, anything that belongs in a session will benefit from SIP!
Jiri Kuthan talked about SLAMP (SER, Linux, Apache, mySQL, Perl/PHP) at the SER developers’ meeting in Prague. He may be more right than he thinks. SIP Express Router is well positioned to become the apache of everything that is sessions-based on the Internet. Do you have an Ajax-based web application that needs to subscribe to a user’s continously updated contact lists in order to provide that extra functionality? The answer is SIP. Do you want to track a GPS unit’s movements? SIP. Do you want to push a map on a user’s mobile phone while you are the phone because he calls you and cannot find your offices? SIP again.
So, get started with SLAMP innovation. Create that SER plugin and connect it to your web application. Create SIP user agents that have nothing to do with VoIP. Let us show the tourists that real innovation is on the Internet, not in the old telco world!