Skype is cool. You can call your friends for a fraction of the cost of regular telephone calls. You can even call for free, if you’re calling another computer with a Skype client and account. The same goes with other VoIP networks. You can call others for free as long as they’re on the same network as your own VoIP client. Skype-to-Skype, FWD-to-FWD, Google Talk to Google Talk, and Yahoo Messenger-to-Yahoo Messenger calls are great, since aside from being clear and crisp, they cost you nothing!

But for me, what’s even greater is VoIP interconnectivity. Imagine if your Google Talk client can call someone with a Skype account, and vice-versa. This is the basic problem that Instant Messaging providers have. Without an open technology that lets one network communicate with another, then we would have islands of information, or in this case, separate networks that don’t talk with each other.

I think this could spell disaster for VoIP, now still a technology in its infancy. How could the technology grow if different people are on different networks. For one, I certainly wouldn’t want my computer’s resources to be eaten up by running more than one VoIP client.