Jangl’s new social voice service, first step to white pages of Voice 2.0?
Jangl, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based start-up that launched last year as an anonymous calling service, is getting ambitious, and has launched a new service, which on the face of it might indicate a desire to cash in on the social networking hype, but in reality could turn the company into the white pages of the web-voice world.
The press release, especially the title, is a turn off smacking of a start-up over hyping itself. I almost passed on this, up until I read this post by Alec Saunders, and started thinking about the longer implications of what Jangl announced.
Here are the basics of this service:
Lets’ say if you meet someone and the only information you have about them, is their email address. You can go to Jangl website, and enter their email address. The Jangl system assigns them a temporary phone number, and allows you to leave them a voice mail message, which is then forwarded to their email inbox.
They can choose to call you back, using Jangl assigned temporary number. You can do the same with someone’s instant messaging identity as well.
Now if a lot of people use this service – hence the social networking push – Jangl can quietly build a directory. You can enter anyone’s email address and find him or her in this directory or white pages. If their plans works, and service gets adoption, Jangl becomes the next generation SIP directory. (Aswath, any thoughts?)
From Jangl’s business perspective, it is part of Jangl’s evolution as a voice services company, moving beyond the anonymous calling (which is paying some of the bills right now.) It also allows the company to compete with Jaxtr and Wengo in the social networking/social media space.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
This is a clever idea that Jangl is working on. I believe that in the early stages, before the spamsters hijack the service, it will be very useful and cool.
The Jangl and Twitters of the world are threatening to spam up our phones. There will be a huge opportunity for phone spam filtering/blocking services to keep unsolicited messaging out.
Great title, Om!
Well… Why would I leave a voice message if I simply can email him/her and eventually ask for a phone #?
I am in the process of analyzing their new offering and till now I see less than what others see. But it is premature. A full analysis needs to wait for a later time. But one thing is for certain – they can not become a SIP directory. Let us say that, the whole world has signed up. Then what Jangl has created is a directory of email/IM addresses that map to a 10 digit phone number that somebody else maps it to a SIP URI which then gets mapped to an IP address by the VoIP provider. Since Jangl is sitting at the inital stage of this mapping serpentine, they can not guarantee reliable mapping.
By the way, I can not resist taking a dig at you for so easily giving them the Voice 2.0 moniker. One of the feature we should be demanding of “2.0″ anything is disintermediation. But what they seem to have done is firmly planted themselves between me and my contacts.
Seb – People meet digitally now, in that context. They know email addresses, IM handles, user names, etc, that’s it. Jangl will make all that an onramp to using Jangl. Why Jangl?
-Keep your digits private
-Call internationally for free
-Control who can call you when & what happens when they do
-Make/receive voice mails or talk/text – your choice
-More to come…
There is a better way of building up a directory, which includes the most valuable information about how people are related/networked to each other: build and offer a great contacts management system.
I’ve described the important features such a system should have here (at the risk of appearing to post blogspam): http://blog.libranlover.net/2007/05/contacts-management-system.html
Aswath, it’s also premature to determine this won’t be a SIP directory.
Look, we’re building to a SIP vision. It’s not here today, and the masses don’t know or care about it today. So rather than trying to issue SIP URIs today and forcing the issue, the idea here is to build services that collapse communications silos. And solving the privacy problem needed to be first, so we did that. Now we’re moving on and expanding this in the form of services that anyone (not just geeks) can use.
Michael:
Let us move the clock forward and you are issuing SIP URIs. Do your subscribers register their SIP clients with you or do they continue to have their own registrars? If it is the latter then I do not see how things have changed from the current (yes, you have eliminated one directory service, but how do you ensure currency of the information?); if it is the former, then yes you do have white pages, but consisting only of your customer base.
Aswath:
We can’t theorize details like this; it would be ignoring what the consumer of the future looks like and wants. Will they have SIP URIs and when? Should we issue them ourselves or just cooperate with them? Our point is, we’ll provide consumers utility that matters, in modes that matter. We’re reeling in some of the promise of SIP, bit by bit. Who knows who’s registered where at that point?
I am heading out to a press thing right now, so if you comment back, it’s not because I’m not interested.
This is not anonymity — it is only 1 way.
Virtual worlds / social networks need REAL anonymous 2-way communication.
This is a farce. It is not anonymous.
By definition it is not.
According to Webster:
1 : not named or identified
2 : of unknown authorship or origin
3 : lacking individuality, distinction, or recognizability
Therefore, Jangl is NOT ANONYMOUS.
Please stop saying that it is.