Skype’s most recent Windows beta allows its users to have IM conversations with Facebook users as well as integration of Facebook contacts and news feeds. The folks at Skype Journal took a closer at the application’s network traffic, which revealed that it uses XMPP to communicate with Facebook’s servers.

This type of integration could in the future be used to achieve interoperability with other IM platforms. Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger currently doesn’t support XMPP, but companies like Yahoo and AOL have been offering some support for the protocol. Facebook added XMPP support to its platform in 2009 to make its chat service more widely available as well.

By far the biggest supporter of XMPP is Google. Not only is the company’s IM service based on the protocol, but it’s also one of the main financial backers of the XMPP Standards Foundation. Just last week, the company announced that it was transitioning elements of its VOIP technology to Jingle, a signaling protocol based on XMPP.

Speaking of VOIP: The fact that Skype has started to support an open standards protocol doesn’t meant hat you’ll see voice or video chat interoperability any time soon. Skype has been using it own, proprietary encryption and communications protocols for its VOIP functionality, and it’s unlikely that Microsoft would abandon these technologies in favor of Google-backed open standards.

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For instance, 77.18 percent of Argentineans love MSN, followed by 9.99 percent who love GTalk. Mexicans (83.72 percent), Brazilians (77.18 percent) Dutch (65.41 percent), French (68.01 percent), Italians (60.45 percent) the Turks (75.6 percent) are all big MSN users. In many parts of Asia, Yahoo is big.

In Germany, however, they heart ICQ, while in the United States AIM (35 percent) still rules with Yahoo (25 percent) and MSN (23.93 percent) getting the silver and the bronze. GTalk has just over 12 percent share in the United States — a surprisingly large number. Another surprising fact about the numbers is how marginal AIM is outside of the States.

My only quibble with this data: Why no Skype, which is a very popular IM client/service across the world? If I remember correctly, EQO started off by offering mobile access to Skype, but later changed its game after being ignored by Skype.

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Machine translation is nothing new: Systran, founded in 1968 to help translate Cold War communications, powered the 1997 launch of the Babelfish service that popularized online translation, and until recently, it was behind Google’s translation systems. Humorous results aside, machine translation works well when software has access to sample text or past translations. “There has been a significant improvement in translation quality because of computing power,” Dimitris Sabatakakis, Systran’s CEO, said.

But relying on previous translations and large samples doesn’t work as well for IM because short messages lack context. And in translation, context is everything. “If you’re trying to translate ‘serveur’ and you know it’s about food, you’ll probably choose ‘waiter,’” Sabatakakis said. “If it’s about computers, you’ll probably choose ‘server.’”

To compensate for context, IM translation company Speaklike uses a combination of software and people and requires that subscribers use its own IM client. Speaklike currently offers four languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese — and the system “daisy chains” languages to get from, say, Portuguese to Chinese by going through English. While having two interpreters might be awkward in person, the only impact in an IM context is a slightly increased delay.

Competitor Meglobe, which launched its translation client on Tuesday, is machine-only, meaning it can offer speed, privacy and more languages but lacks the benefit of humans checking translations. Meglobe, which uses Jabber instead of its own client, hopes the wisdom of the crowds can help make its translations better over time by suggesting better interpretations.

VoIP service provider JAJAH is also getting into the interpreter game, starting with English-to-Mandarin Chinese. Their new JAJAH Babel service, developed in conjunction with IBM, lets users dial their local JAJAH number, say an English phrase, and hear it played back in Chinese or vice-versa. The software combines voice recognition and translation, but getting it to understand what you’re saying can be a challenge even on a clear phone line.

SpeakLike’s Cohen sees significant opportunity for alternative ways of communicating. “The Chinese government trained a hundred thousand people to speak English. Typically that’s two or three designated speakers in each company,” he said. “If an engineer in the U.S. is talking to his counterpart in China, everything goes through a point person. This technology breaks down the barriers for direct communications across the organization.”

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“We call it the ‘biddy-biddy-boop’ sound,” said Bill Byrne, whose official title at Google (GOOG) is senior voice expert. “The technical term is the ‘fetch audio.’”

The fetch audio is precisely what its name implies, the sound the service makes to let you know that it’s working on retrieving the information you’ve requested. Putting the fetch together, however, isn’t as easy as you’d think.

“The system working sound is a particularly difficult sound to do. You have to have just the right tone, the right mood, the right signal. It can’t be busy or too monotonous,” explained Byrne. “It has to be a quick noise to evoke efficiency. It can’t be too uniform, like a ticking clock.”

Byrne has been designing audio interfaces used by people to interact with speech services for the past 10 years, and in that time, he’s gone through a lot of different tones and sounds. While it would be fun to say he locked himself in a room for weeks to come up with the perfect prompt, the truth is much more simple. “I needed something quickly,” said Byrne. “So I decided to just imitate the various sounds I had worked with over the years.” It was supposed to be a placeholder.

But the human-mimicking-a-machine, “biddy-biddy-boop” sound stuck. In fact, what you hear is the original recording (with a little engineering to lower the volume and add fades). It beat out numerous other ideas, including “Jeopardy”-like hold music, and (gratefully) an aborted attempt at replicating human conversation (as in an automated voice telling you “One sec, I had it right here” as you hear papers rustling in a simulated “search”).

Byrne and his team wanted something “different than an over-produced jingle,” he said. “We wanted slightly playful, within Google branding experience, and not corny.”

The evidence proves that Byrne made the right choice. “All the user data and studies show it’s overwhelmingly a
piece that people tend to enjoy,” he said. It’s become so popular that his co-workers now ask him to perform it.

But Byrne doesn’t want the sound to be around forever. In fact, he’s trying to get rid of it — but it’s all for your benefit. “The goal is to get rid of the noise to get rid of any latency,” he said. In other words, as GOOG-411 improves, its searches will become so quick that Byrne’s biddy-biddy-boop sound will be a thing of the past.

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The wireless operators in India already have cash flowing into their coffers, and can afford to pay for the spectrum. Given that spectrum is nation’s public property, giving it away for free should not even be considered. I think it is clear to me – they should charge more like a leasing fee for it. The spectrum compromise, should be that the money should pay for helping armed forces move to a new frequency and perhaps create a rural telephony fund. Still, I see an impasse over 3G emerging in India, which could stall India’s fast growing telephony markets.

As an aside, one of the big stories in India that is not being covered in the west is the ongoing split between the Ambani family – the owners of Reliance Infocomm. Reliance is going to go to Anil Ambani, one of the brothers who also happens to be a member of the upper house in the Indian parliament. There are rumors that Reliance Infocomm is not all that as it is made out to be. A 3G license for free could come in quite handy, don’t you think? Or perhaps it is me who sees shapes in shadows.

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There is free and paid version of the service. With this, Srivats Sampath, CEO of Mercora, says they are taking the battle directly to the satellite users. (Remember, the satellite guys have just started to stream their music channels on the web, so this is more like tit for tat!) That they are doing it, doesn’t surprise me. Orb’s service (review pending!) already lets you listen to your disk-based music, but Mercora takes the concept of “playlist” sharing to another level.

There is just one problem with this model: carriers.

Given that this really threatens their business model and insatiable greed (aka selling songs at $2.99 a pop), how long do you think before the wireless operators shut the service down. Sampath, says that he is taking the model to the carriers, and hopefully they will see that they are cheaper and more interactive than radio. He does acknowledge that carriers can shut them down fast, but he points out that this doesn’t disrupt their ‘sales’ model. He was quick to point out that more and more devices are coming with wifi, and most offices have wifi so it can bypass the cellular networks. Another problem – the frail state of our wireless networks. Unless you are on Verizon EVDO, you are basically reduced to using IxRTT or GPRS networks. Remember Windows Mobile devices can’t support EDGE for now. “I tested it with GPRS/T-Mobile and it works great,” says Sampath. I will try it and update you folks tomorrow.

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