I’m just stepping back a minute to think about what Emerging Telephony actually is.

You might have seen my earlier musings on the different philosophical underpinnings of “Western” telephony and “Eastern” thought. In an oversimplified nutshell, the Western approach puts the individual in the centre of the universe. The Eastern idea is to put the group in the middle.

I see “conversation” as being the shadow of a group. So future telephony may look quite different from PSTN-style calling and even philosophical cousins like Skype. We don’t put groups or conversations at the centre of our “Voice 2.0” telephony experience. This could provide a philosophical problem to all the VCs and geeks here at ETel.

Here’s a concrete example. Teens are group-centric. They need to belong, get group affirmation. They send a zillion SMS messages to wring a group experience out of the technology they have.

But imagine if members of the group could see when other members of the group are in a conversation (IM or voice). Then you can (virtually) walk up and try to join in. It requires some digital social gestures that mimic a conversation pause and turning to allow the new person into the ring.

Hey! Telephony is supposed to be a substiute for “being there”. This is the kind of “presence” experience that today is totally missed. (Presence isn’t just smiley icons, folks.) “Voice 2.0” doesn’t even mimic the real world yet, let alone exceed it. And many of the ETel examples are still hamstrung by the legacy thinking of 120 years of circuit 2-person telephony where presence is a 4th class citizen. We’ve still got some learning and exploring to do.

UPDATE: Another example: Skype’s grouping feature (bless them for the effort) is entirely manual. But what the users probably need is some kind of semi-automated grouping of contacts, based on call patterns, social network analysis etc. Personally, I wouldn’t have bothered with the feature at all unless it was adding some serious “wow” and makes life for the users much, much simpler. Yes, I’m setting the bar high. But humans are sophisticated social animals, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise if our conversation tools need to act intelligently too.

Teenagers might automatically find other blog posts from Martin on his Telepocalypse blog.

There's a new calendar+groupware in town for Skypers and it brings some slick new features with it. I met yesterday with the management team at Airena who took me through the paces on their Airset - Skype integrated solution for group management. AirSet software allows users to manage all their groups - family, work, social - in one place using a free Web-based service that includes calendars, address books, to-do lists and blogs. It's an interesting product and I've extended my testing to a group calendar for the Skype Journal and another for the family.

Airset was described to me as a "Lifeware" product for the small companies, and individuals that want control of their life but don't have access to MS Exchange servers and the complex systems that groupware traditionally requires. The more I've played with it the more it makes sense to me. I'm not part of a large company and yet I do need to coordinate calendars, and updates with others. Similarly, many social networking services for me are simply 'broken" as they don't integrate effectively with the events in my life. It's also responds quickly as a result of being "Ajax-enabled". I'll leave that to the real techies.

I'm pleased to see Airset incorporate Skype. By using Skype presence information and adding easy calling it provides a whole new dimension to managing events. It's also yet another illustration of where communications is going.

Thinking about setting an appointment for the group; Skype makes it easy to check online; potentially reducing time and adding productivity. By adding Skype, now voice services are integrated so instant conference calls or mulit-chats can help with what were once logistical nightmares. Airset is also demonstrating what "mashups" are all about. If you look deeper they are also hooking into Google Maps and tying mapping information to contact details. Thus uploading your contacts means you now have a map at a click for everyone.

A point worth remembering is you can manage your groups, (eg a groups calendar) and never ever have any of your contacts join up and be Airset members. AirSet will still send them messages and reminders. For those wanting to augment email reminders with mobile updates then Arena has a premium service which I'm sure is going to evolve to add a lot more. Updates are sent by email and SMS is ready to integrate with your mobile phone. Overall it synched quickly and easily with my Outlook contacts and calendar system. I even feel happier that I now have a backup for that part of my life!

There are other Skype related groupware products in the works. However, this is a strong signal (even late!) that companies providing other core services (eg an accounting package) should be racing to add VoIP functionality to their solutions. Another thing to keep in mind. Airena like others should be complemented for testing and moving forward with Skype and Google Maps API integrations. However, soon we are going to see IM agnostic solutions. Airset could just as easily cross connect different IM systems or turn their learnings to Google Talk or Gizmo.

So whats your Calendar solution? Does it integrate with Skype? Can you access it anywhere?

Blogs become a memory aid, a backup brain, if you will. A compendium of ideas and observation, some incomplete, others seeking connection, but they are snapshots day by day of our intellectual lives. So much so that a good practice is to review your posts. Look through the past month, the past quarter, the past year for patterns, for ideas you'd started to express that you can now finish, for rough ideas you can polish, for events and people and places that you'd forgotten were a part of your life. This introspection, this audit, makes you more aware of your progress through time, as a witness to your own life and as a critic of your own voice and perspective.

I've been blogging since 1998, more or less continuously. And those blogs are a legacy of my life and thought and expression since then.

But long before that, since Windows 3.1 days, I kept phone notes. Text files with names like "fn 19970423 Dad.txt". They are filled with often useless, context-free notes of the day, some transcribed from Post-Its and others written straight into Windows Notepad. Lots of phone numbers that ring to different people, lots of first names I can't recall, fragments of dialog that meant something at the time, and breadcrumbs to people who might have been colleagues, friends, family, or lovers.

And with mobiles and Skype, I spend more time in conversation than just about any time in my life.

Skype is helping a little bit.

Depending on my configuration, Skype keeps copies of my chat conversations. I can title text chats for better recall. And with one of the third-party plug-ins, I can record my voice calls.

I live with Skype running all the time so I want much more.

I want Skype to help me keep better notes.

• To keep more context of my conversations (date, time, full names, links to related conversations).
• To keep promises made.
• And promises kept.
• All the calls I make, even if they don't go through.
• All the voice mails I leave, even if unrequited.
• Every attempt by people to contact me, whether by chat or by voice or video.
• Any and all profile information available to me about my friends and all conversants, snapshotted over time - not just updated.
• And let me annotate transcripts and files with notes that aren't actually part of the chat transcript or audio in the call.
• Let me tag each conversation if I want.

And I want Skype to help me use those memories.

• To organize them, by date, by topic, by social distance, by social context.
• To search them.
• To bounce that data across other systems for enrichment, like looking up people in LinkedIn or syncing my Skype contact list with my Yahoo! and Gmail address books.

Memory is one of the elements of intelligence. By helping me understand and use my social interaction history, Skype makes me smarter. You amplify that intelligence by bringing that help to me at specific moments when I need it (when someone calls, when a contact or prior conversation is mentioned during a call, when citing a conversation in an email or a blog post or another chat). You help me manage myself by helping me see deep patterns

• in my relationships (this person was a close friend but you haven't talked with them in six months),
• in my behavior (you seem to call this person every Thursday before lunch),
• in my interests (you seem to be talking about Logitech a lot this month), and
• in my use of time.

Please: make me smarter.

Public conversations make the world smarter.

Blogs are one-to-many communication. My words, flung to the Internet. Scoured by search engines. Subscribed to or stumbled upon.

Skype conversations are mulitparty. It's the difference between a standup comic with a microphone and an improv troupe. Between an a capella soloist and a choir. Between a soliloquy and a play.

There is a conversation among bloggers, if you can call it that. Threads very loosely joined. I see something in someone else's blog and post a reply in mine. Mostly, though, blogs are monologous. Monoblogs, if you will. Masterblogtion, to be unkind. Conversations, like sex, are so much better when you're not alone. They have the gusto of interpersonal psychology. Dramatic structure. Clarification of thought. Action and reaction.

When we treat multiparty conversations as blogfodder, is it useful? Often. We see this, to a degree, in some of Bill Campbell's interviews. All parties consent, one party cleans up a conversation and publishes it. Then Skype Journal's readers become privy to heretofore private conversation. And they can capitalize on Bill's access and effort. Later, strangers will find it via Google, other bloggers will link to it (it now has a permalink), and that little talk is now history.

Does making private conversations public (some might call it publication) serve a public good? Build the creative commons? Yes, to the degree the conversation itself warrants it. The same logic that applies to blogging and podcasting applies here.

Some tools, like Pamela, make it easier to archive my conversations on servers by blogging the text chats and podcasting the audio ones. Few of my conversations are Google-worthy, let alone blogworthy, but some will be important for private family blogs and other conversations will be handy in private project and team blogs.

So the tools and personal incentives are coming together to make conversation sharing cheap, easy, fun, and rewarding.

Skype and others of its species approach a threshold moment, a tipping point, where their users may contribute more content to the searchable Internet than does the blogosphere.

For every voice chat I have, I have 10 text chats, so it won't take many Skypers publishing conversations to become a significant factor in search results.

As millions of conversations leave digital footprints, joining our collective memory organ, and as we choose to publish some of them the way we do blog posts, we'll see a new connective tissue emerge. A Technorati of dialog. A Google of conversations. So I can discover other people talking about the same local issues that I am. So I can join ongoing conference calls the way some people join a listserv thread.

And as our conversations enter the commons, we will be that much smarter, that much more connected, that much better informed about our world, our communities, and ourselves.

The latest Skype profiles have some information on them that won't make everyone happy. With the upgrade to 1.4 Skype shows your buddies their "friends" count. So if you look up my profile you will find I have 289 currently. Some of you may want to opt out and not share this data. By contrast I think it is really a very exciting development. It also provides some new opportunities down the road.

I'd infer that when we start sharing buddy counts we also share an element of reputation. In the future you may only take calls from Skypers who have more than 25 people on their list. Otherwise they have to ask for an authorisation. You could probably choose the number. That adds an additonal hurdle for spammers. Similarly if I am getting a call from someone with a few hundred contacts they are more likely to be genuine. I also know that they are more likely to be able to bridge someone else into our conversation. Example in a dating environment, who you are talking to may be the matchmaker.

It's easy to see Skype is beginning to experiment with statistics (how many buddies) and later we will get info like how many buddies we each have online and the number we have in common. Some may even want to progressively expose that information. Oh, it also means that Skype will in one form or another invade the social and business networking space. When or if we finally get contact grouping it will be interesting to see... if I create a new group --- what new options that may bring in the Skype API. Will those groups names be exposed? I certainly hope so. It would create some new value.