Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Update- Statistics of Voice apps on facebook platform

Look’s like my article on statistics of voip apps on facebook
has created quite a stir in the blogosphere. First it was OM,On Facebook, VoIP Has a Sore Throat and followed by Stuart, Alec, andy and other voip bloggers. What started as a personal curiosity of mine, has initiated a bigger debate on whether voip apps are meant for social networking platforms like facebook and myspace world. I always had this doubt in my mind about these apps and the platform they are targeting. Maybe, this is not the right platform for some of these apps.

Here are some interesting links to this debate
On Facebook, VoIP Has a Sore Throat
Pat Phelan,Slow takeup of facebook voice apps
Stuart Henshall Links
Voip applications are failing
Jon arnold
Ike Elliot
Jim Courtney, skype journal

Interesting reaction from blogosphere:
Giga OM

VoIP widget offerings - they don’t offer a vastly improved user experience when compared with the simplicity of the phone. Sure they save pennies per minute on international long distance calls, but even those costs are coming down quite sharply

Alec sanders
In fact, 27% of Facebook users are users of Facebook mobile. So it's not really a surprise that minute stealers are having a tough time. In fact, I'll go further — anybody who believes that users will really fire up a PC and log into Facebook to make a call when you can just pick up the phone and call for pennies, is deluding themselves

Jim Courtney, skype journal
Facebook is no nirvana for VoIP services; six month total Facebook VoIP installations = 1.5 days' of Skype account registrations

Andy Abramson
While I remain convinced that apps not minutes are what matters, we have to realize that the market that adopts early are largely the online, non talkative crowd. They IM chat and email. They are more comfortable not talking

Thomas Howe
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

OM and Alec have the updated statistics for voip apps on facebook (I have attached the pics to this post). Oh, BTW Alec didn’t like his iotum being added to the voip list. I understand iotum uses TDM switching for voice traffic and doesn’t use IP as backbone for voice. I added iotum as a voice application rather than a voip application. In addition, I see some niche in iotum group conference compared to standalone voice application. To me, these kinds of applications have a greater appeal to enterprise and business users than individuals.
Maybe I should have changed the title of my article to “voice apps” rather than “voip apps”.
I will write a follow up article on this topic to dwell more into what are other communication tools that are being accepted by the users in social networking. So stay tuned!

Here is the latest statistics of voice apps on facebook:( courtesy OM and Alec)
















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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great one. Keep up the good work

Ravi Shankar said...

Thanks for the nice comment