“When you reduce the cost of voice communication to zero, people will come up with all new ways to use it. ” With that single sentence, uttered to a reporter on the San Jose Mercury News Henry Gomez—tapped last month by eBay, in the wake of its $2.6BN acquisition of Skype, as general manager of the newly formed North American division—encapsulates why “Web 2.0” aficionados like Dion Hinchcliffe are utterly convinced that VoIP is a must-have ingredient of the new mix.

 

JupiterResearch, the research arm of Alan Meckler’s business empire, estimates that by 2010 more than 20 million households will be using some form of Internet phone service; yet VoIP, also according to JupiterResearch, was being used by only 1.2 million households in 2004.

Gomez told the Mercury News that his aim is to “make Skype a household name in North America,” just as it already is in Europe (from where Skype originates, with its Estonian engineers, Danish co-founder Janus Friis and Swedish CEO Niklas Zennström) and the Far East. Personally I hope that, adept communicator that he is—his promotion to GM of Skype North America was handed to him while he was Meg Whitman’s VP of communications and government—Gomez will stay connected to this vision of Skype as a channel for Web 2.0-style creativity. Commercial, social, and technical.

The cast of Web 2.0 is still emerging but one thing’s clear: Voice over IP will be playing a major role, just as video will. If Skype inserts itself into the mix, as it clearly intends to, then the network effect that the Father of the Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe, has imprinted in all our heads, will be unleashed big time, Skype’s existing user base being so vast but above all so global.

 

Embracing Skype could be the simplest and fastest way for the U.S. i-Technology community to do an end run around madcap isolationist attempts such as that announced last week by (of all people) the U.S. Air Force to take the “world” out of World Wide Web. With a Skype-enabled Web 2.0 paradigm, Secretary of the US Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley can, basically, go take a hike. They may just as well try to nail raspberry jelly to the wall as “dominate” cyberspace, as they apparently propose to—unless the whole thing is simply one big, anti-US motivated phishing-type hoax, which would not at all surprise me.

 

Free (as in beer) is one of the drivers of Web 2.0. It is what has made Google the new Microsoft—except that in my view Google is going to eclipse Microsoft before too long not only in aims and scope but also in pure revenue terms. Anyone who has not established themselves a free Gmail account and taken advantage of the vast free storage that comes with it, is (pardon my French) nuts. Or should that be noisettes. Anyone who has not joined a (free) social software-driven professional network like Linked-In, ditto. Anyone not keeping photos at a (free) photosharing site like Flickr must have more faith than I do in the longevity of their hard disk. Anyone not blogging using a (free) blogging service such as blog-n-play, likewise.