Tim Panton

Founder, PhoneFromHere.com

Providing Online Social Networks With a Voice
9 minutes, 4.3mb, recorded 2008-03-12
Tim Panton

Social networks are one of the hottest areas of the web now, but they're not very social in the human sense. Humans interact mostly by talking, but social networks (and the internet in general) are primarily textual. Tim Panton of PhoneFromHere.com has created tools to incorporate the social aspects of spoken communication into web sites. PhoneFromHere.com allows users to make phone calls without installing special software or using a telephone.

In this talk from the Emerging Communications Conference, Tim shares the lessons he learned about putting phone features onto web pages. First, the user experience has to be better than using a phone or else users won't bother. Second, it has to be consistent with the design, behavior and expectation of a site. Third, call events should be related to what the user is doing on their screen. Finally, the more you can do to reduce the impact of placing or receiving a call, the more it will get used. The overall goal is to move calls from being an isolated experience into the rest of people's normal lives.


Tim Panton has been a software developer for more than 25 years, working on a diverse range of projects, from chemical plant simulation to tourism web sites. He is also a contributor to open source projects, in particular GJTAPI a framework for implementing JTAPI (The Java Telephony API) and Westhawk's Java SNMP stack. In recent years Tim has been predominantly involved in Asterisk development and implementation, working closely with key industry players he has been championing innovative integration of voice technologies in the social networking market for PhoneFromHere.com.

Resources

This free podcast is from our Emerging Communications series.

For The Conversations Network:

  • Post-production audio engineer: Calantha Elsby
  • Website editor: Peter Christensen
  • Series producer: Sathyaish Chakravarthy