The ceaselessly energetic Iotum team has released a Facebook app that gives social networking a voice it can use.

Known for its “Relevance Engine” that attempts to bring some human intelligence and brain power to incoming calls, the Ottawa-based Iotum’s app is about as close to a click-and-call service as one can get on Facebook.

Setting up a free conference call (which can consist of as few as two participants) takes about 30 seconds. And participants are reminded via SMS on their cell phone of the conference and the number to call.

Unlike typical conference calling services, there’s no need to enter a pin or room number as entry into a conference is determined via caller ID (or a keyed phone number in the event the CID is not recognized).

If a participant is on certain Nokia phones or an Apple iPhone, simply “clicking” on the number in the SMS puts him or her right into the conference. A small viewer embedded in Facebook can shows all the invitees to the conference, with those in attendance flagged.

It’s quite painless, and very slick.

In what was billed as a “historic” conference call by its organizer Moshe Maeir of the Flat Planet Phone Company, Alec Saunders and Howard Thaw of Iotum and a group of some six telecom pundits participated in the first public Facebook teleconference Wednesday afternoon.
With the exception of a disconnection apparently caused by a Facebook glitch, the call went off with nary a hitch. All participants, including Jim Courtney of Skype Journal and Gary Kim of IP Business and Fat Pipe, appeared to agree that Iotum’s efforts to blend social networking and voice communications holds significant merit.

Saunders and Thaw assured us that there would be significant additions to the service in short order, including the ability for a call moderator to exercise conference controls, integration into personal contact and calendar utilities and methods allowing non-Facebook members to participate.

Remember Palm? You know, the guys who made “Palm Pilot” synonymous with “handheld.” They haven’t been trendsetters for a while, but some of us who are still fans were very hopeful with the ballyhooed preview of the Palm Foleo ultra-mobile more-than-a-phone-less-than-a-PC device.

It turns out they should have called it the Folie.

Today Palm aborted the Foleo without ever shipping one. Which may prove that the Internet appliance and Tablet computing segments remain elusive.

According Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s blog, “it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to deliver products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.”

The company’s long term objective is to focus on “one Palm experience.” But there’s no clue as to what that might be. In the process, Palm is taking a $10 million hit to earnings.

Some are saying that this will leave a perfect space for Apple’s rumored ultra-light laptop to slide into.

So what does that mean for someone like me whose Treo is closing in on its fifth birthday? At this point, I think it means I’m probably going to be looking elsewhere for my next generation handheld.

Businesses and ITSPs have long-needed an inexpensive way to connect legacy analog devices to a VoIP network, and Linksys announcement of the SPA8000 — an eight-port FXS Analog Terminal Adaptor device — early this year had many eagerly anticipating its release.

Finally, that time is here. The Linksys SPA8000 is now available in the United States.

We’ve been testing a unit Linksys made avaialble to us for several months. Read our First Look at the Linksys SPA8000-G1 or if you have already bought a unit, try the new Linksys SPA8000 Device Configuration Wizard.

PhoneGnome customers can relax. The feared service interruption that users were alerted to last night likely won’t materialize. And besides, if the VoIP service doesn’t work, with PhoneGnome you always have the fallback POTS.

Yesterday evening, the company sent out a notice that one of its providers was shutting down operations on August 31 — TelEvolution deserves credit for coming out with the information before customers experienced problems. Because this provider hosted a significant part of TelEvolution’s traffic, the development could have had a massive impact on the VoIP provider.

Today it’s looking like the worst can be averted.”Other partners are stepping up and it’s looking like it’s only going to be a minor disruption, if that,” says TelEvolution CEO David Beckemeyer.

In the future, disruptions of this type will be even less likely, according to Beckmeyer.

“We’re working with a better vendor — Hurricane Electric — that offers better service guarantees. But,” he adds, “we’re paying five times as much.”

There’s a warning here for other VoIP providers, says Beckmeyer. “The way the industry is set up, individual companies can pull the rug out from under you overnight. A lot of VoIP players are one step away from the same thing.”

The most entertaining explanation I’ve heard about last week’s Skype outage is this posting from Rostislav Siryk in his blog:

“Skype’s outage is …[a] natural consequence of quantum physics. Because users [are] like atoms.”

In other words, it’s within the realm of possibility that all the world’s PCs will download a Microsoft update and reboot at the identical moment.

On the other hand, when was the last time you saw an object move by itself as a result of all its atoms just happening to tip the same direction?

I thought so. That’s why many are saying Skype’s explanation, issued this morning, is fishy.

Certainly, no one at Skype or Ebay is saying much. My request for a real live conversation last week was answered politely with a copy of the company’s then-current statement and a link to the Skype blog. As Skype has talked with me openly in the past, it’s thought provoking at the very least.

But this discussion begs the question. Even accepting the Microsoft-did-it explanaon, the outage is nonetheless an object lesson for the entire VoIP industry of another immutable natural law: Murphy’s.

It highlights a fundamental industry problem, says VoIP gray-beard Erik Lagerway. Providers ultimately don’t control the underlying network that delivers their service.

“I’ve been in this business 15 years and over that time VoIP has been in beta 15 years. The main reason is that the network that people are riding on is unreliable,” says Lagerway, whose VoIP pedigree includes executive roles at Shift Networks and Eyeball Networks as well as founding Vocalscape Communications and Xten Networks (now Counterpath).

Unless a provider owns the upstream broadband network, a ‘best effort’ service is all a provider can promise, according to Lagerway.

“If the upstream provider has decided they’re going to be making some changes, you’re going to be feeling those changes. If the upstream provider decides they want to filter out [other providers’ VoIP] packets or handle them with less priority than their own packets, you’re going to experience that regardless of what kind of service you have.

“If they decide they’re going to route packets to Istanbul, they can do that,” he says, adding, “The long and short of it is that the incumbents have their long arm deeply inside the network.”

Having said that, Lagerway does allow that Skype’s proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture – a closely guarded “black box” — leaves the system unnecessarily vulnerable in a way that conventional centralized services like Vonage don’t.

“My main issue with Skype is that it’s a closed system,” says Lagerway, an outspoken evangelist for the open communications standard, SIP. “Having one guy [Janus Friis] create the entire peer-to-peer architecture, it’s destined to fail – no one is smart enough.

“What’s going to happen when the next Windows update comes along? What this says is that, at any given moment, Microsoft can screw over every single Skype user. That’s a serious problem. The fact that no one even thought of this is mind-boggling.”

Lagerway points to Skype’s implementation – a self-organizing P2P network operating exclusively on users’ PCs – as untenable for providing a service to millions of users.

“To have such a dependency on so many people’s PCs, that’s pretty risky business. What happens if a whole lot of people decide to de-install?”

A better approach for a P2P network is an architecture that fails back to a centralized client-server network – the way TelTel’s P2P VoIP network operates, for example. “That’s the way SIP operates,” Lagerway explains. “It’s a peer-to-peer network but it bootstraps the operation with a client-server network.”

In the end, while no one can ever fully escape Murphy’s Law, a more open approach could have helped Skype avert this particular disaster, Lagerway says.

“If this [Skype] had been an open standards projects, you would have had much more peer review. If they had used SIP, this particular outage would have been less likely. It could have possibly been averted,” he explains. “Correcting it now is going to be costly.”

The legendary Murphy could have told Skype that, too.