If I hadn’t of spent most of last week down in DC live blogging the Libby trial deliberations, I would be down there right now to participate in Freedom to Connect. Fortunately, it will be streaming online with a live chat back channel going on at the same time.

There are many aspects to our freedom to connect. Some of the bigger issues are things like net neutrality, municipal wireless and the digital divide. Yet there are other things that inhibit our ability to connect. How usable are communication tools to use? How well do they interconnect?

Yesterday, I read Hadar’s blog post, I’m a Phone Weenie. Many of my friends at F2C love Skype. It is a decentralized tool that gets around efforts of big business and big government to control our access to telephony. It is very user friendly, and runs on a lot of platforms, other than my old Windows NT based box. Yet Hadar commented,

I eschewed the use of Skype for a long time, and only launched it when someone else specifically asked me to have a conversation via Skype. Why? Because Skype isn’t standards compliant and therefore can’t interact (easily) with other systems, including SIP, Asterisk, etc.

He goes on to talk about Google Talk being standards compliant, based on XMPP. So, is there a way to connect Google Talk to other systems? He points out gtalk2voip. I’ve tested this a little bit, and it isn’t quite ready for prime time. Gizmo has just come out with a new version of their product that boasts interoperability with Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, and Windows Live users. Gizmo is SIP based and they look particularly promising as well, yet they still have a little bit of the not ready for prime time feel. When these tools start working a little better we have the potential for easy to use communications tools that interconnect nicely.

Meanwhile, there is another area where people are connecting online. That is Second Life. One of the problems with Second Life is that much of the communications is text based there. People have connected in Second Life for the text, video and avatars, and then supplemented the connection with voice provided over Skype based voice conferences.

Last week, on the Second Life blog, it was announced that they would be bringing voice to Second Life. How easy will it be to use Second Life audio? Will it interoperate easily with other systems? We will have to see.

Anyway you look at it, we are moving towards more ease of use and better interoperability and that can only help our freedom to connect.

(Tags: F2C)