Windows Live Messenger with VoIP

V-man writes "Microsoft has just launched Windows Live Messenger with free PC-to-PC phone calls and PC-to-phone calling as a pay service provided by Verizon Web Calling. Of course, most people doing PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone calling are probably using Firefox...too bad the Launch Page isn't Mozilla friendly."

Comments

Of Course!

[mythosaz]

Of course, most people doing PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone calling are probably using Firefox

Of course? Says who. Slashdot, opinions from nerds.

Re:Of Course!

[Overly Critical Guy]

Yeah, I think he misspelled "Skype."

Not only that, but Firefox loads the page just fine. What an idiotic submission.

Not Mozilla Friendly?

[Bluey]

too bad the Launch Page isn't Mozilla friendly.

What part isn't Mozilla friendly? I just went to the launch page with Firefox 1.5.0.4 and was able to navigate through the tabs and download the installer with no problem.

Re:Not Mozilla Friendly?

[Khuffie]

No it isn't. It uses Flash 8, which Macromedia hasn't released a Linux client for.

Solution looking for a problem.

[Tackhead]

Actually, it's worse than that. It's a bunch of crappy business plans and licensing arrangements looking for a solution looking for a problem.

It's VOIP! And instead of bypassing the telco, it requires a telco! And instead of working on every computer, it only works on Windows computers. And instead of being free, it costs money! And instead of working with every IM system, it only works with MSN! And instead of rendering it in HTML, we decided to give Adobe/Macromedia a cut and do the whole web page in Flash!

About all it's missing is a .us domain name for Web 2.0 buzzword compliance.

Re:Solution looking for a problem.

[Frosty Piss]

Don't like it? Don't use it. Not everyone shares your objections. Not everyone hates every single implimentation of Flash. Some people have no issues with Windows. There are other solutions out there for you. This one is not for you.

Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...most people doing PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone calling are probably using Firefox..."

Oh? Where did you dig up this little nugget of information?

Two points: 1) not only über-geeks are doing PC-to-PC calling. 2) Lots of über-geeks actually use IE.

Re:Firefox?

[Auntie Virus]

3) Skype is currently free for PC-to-Phone. Free as in beer.

Voice chat

[Gax]

I'm curious, why is everyone promoting it as a new feature for instant messaging? Yahoo Messenger has had voice chat facilities for ages.

Re:Voice chat

[Anonymous Coward]

msn messenger has had voice chat for years too

Strange problems once installed.

[caluml]

A guy at work installed it on a trials machine, and that machine suffered weird problems. It could release, obtain, and renew a DHCP address, but couldn't ping anything, not even the gateway (which is also the switch that does the DHCP stuff).
He rolled the system back, and it all works.

There is a lot of different stuff on that machine though, so it **might** not be just due to that. I wonder if it hooks into the IP stack at some level, and that's what messed it up? Anyone else have any similar issues with it?

Provided by Verizon, eh?

[QCompson]

The nice thing about dealing with verizon is that the U.S. government will archive all of your conversations for free! Of course, you may not be able to access them, but it's nice to know there are backups out there somewhere.

Swimming or drowning?

[quokkapox]

One of the things I was taught when I learned how to swim as a child was that a drowning person tends to panic and flail around and fleetingly grab at everything and anything without rational thought. They'll even drag down their own potential rescuer. They can't help it.

Hey, it's better than a CAR ANALOGY.

Re:Launch Page

[jasonwc]

Perhaps the submitter doesn't have Flash installed or is using an extension like noscript or flashblock. When I loaded the site with noscript enabled, I saw only a blank page. I had to allow the site before it displayed properly. Yet, I would hope the submitter would be intelligent enough to know the difference between a page that doesn't load properly in Firefox and one that simply needs the Flash plugin or JavaScript support (in the case of noscript users).

SIP

[Andy Dodd]

It's called the Session Initiation Protocol, and pretty much every VoIP service OTHER than Skype uses/supports it. (With a few small exceptions such as Google Talk which uses the Jingle VoIP extensions to the XMPP (aka Jabber) protocol). Note in that particular case that Google and many of the big proponents of SIP (especially Project Gizmo/SIPPhone) have been working on solutions for XMPP+Jingle interoperability with SIP.

There are a wide variety of SIP softphones available, just as there are a wide variety of SIP service providers. Many of these also support the IAX protocol, which is primarily used by Asterisk PBX systems.

Examples, most of these service providers provide their own SIP client, but in most cases SIP clients are interchangeable between SIP services:
StanaPhone (http://www.stanaphone.com/) - Free incoming DIDs (dial-in phone numbers) in various New York area codes
SIPPhone/Gizmo Project (http://www.gizmoproject.com/) - Free PC-to-PC, DIDs and outgoing PSTN cost money (not much though)
Free World Dialup - Primarily PC-to-PC (or Asterisk-to-Asterisk or whatever), but with some PSTN in/out capability
The list goes on and on, and I haven't even included the "landline replacement" VoIP providers. (Vonage in the U.S. is the most well known example, but most educated consumers hate them as they have some rather customer-unfriendly policies such as locking telephone adapters to their service and forbidding the use of your own telephone adapter without paying a significant extra fee). A few other providers do use other (although usually still known and standardized) protocols such as AT&T CallVantage (which uses the MGCP protocol).

See http://www.voip-info.org/ for LOTS of addition information on hardware, setup, and cheap providers.