While monitoring the Tweetstream surrounding the announcement, I noticed that more than a few “unified communications” (UC) experts referred to the service as an example of UC. I strongly disagree. The service doesn’t really unify anything. Facebook is just taking control of all the streams that cross over into its walled garden and then delivering the results in a context that makes it most deliverable to the user. (This approach has already begun to raise privacy concerns exemplified by this Tweet from HARO founder Peter Shankman “So all our chat/email/text/IM history in one place – That Facebook will OWN? No thanks.” I don’t think that’s the kind of UC people want to buy into.

On the other hand, there’s a lot going on under the hood with FB messaging that has nothing to do with UC and showcases the power of RC concept. As the peripatetic Robert Scoble points out in a Tweet “Geeks will like this. Facebook’s new messaging system is built on Cassandra, hBase, Haystack, Thrift, ZooKeeper, memcache…” These are examples of the rich base of open source assets that today’s RC adherents have to work with.

That rich genetic material also includes cloud-based instantiations of Microsoft’s Office Suite as explained in this blog post by Takeshi Numoto, a Corporate VP at Microsoft:

As shared in Facebook’s announcement, Facebook’s new messaging platform integrates the Office Web Apps to enable Facebook users to view Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with just one click. As you know, Office helps you create stunning documents that bring your ideas to life. Now you can easily share those ideas with your friends and family on Facebook. I’m really excited about being able to make it even easier for people to use Office to access and share information across different devices, networks and platforms. With the Office Web Apps on Facebook, you have even more ways to express yourself with Office and easily share your thoughts with people that are important to you.

If it is “unification” it is highly selective and user powered. True to Darwin and the notion of natural selection, there will be aspects of “facebook.com” that are destined to enjoy high popularity, usage and longevity. With Microsoft’s endorsement (the software giant holds equity in Facebook), it has the potential to become a powerful platform for sharing and collaboration inside and among enterprise employees and partners. I don’t see a robust link to reliable communications infrastructure (meaning a relationship with a network operator) at this time, but would expect some of the global network operators (and infrastructure providers) that are already Microsoft partners to figure out how to profit from business efforts to support (and control) social interactions emanating from desktops and cubicles.

Of course, I’d also like to see more initiatives around support of voice services.

From a usability perspective, app designers have made the “Push to Talk” button more prominent once you have entered a “conversation”. As always, you can start it much like listening to a voice message, but you can speed up the replay by pressing a “rabbit” icon and, in essence, catch up to real time. From that point on, as the promotion will go, it’s like “IM for your voice”.

Today RightNow “unveiled” RightNow CX for Facebook, a product that will be generally available in November. It comes as a response to requests from customers and end-users alike for an easy mechanism to mash-up formal support capabilities into a company’s presence on Facebook. The product is a Facebook App that, when installed, creates a “Support” tab on a company’s wall. When visitors (be they customers or prospects) click on the tab, they can avail themselves of a number of options, including self-service, “crowd service”, or live agent assistance, all based on RightNow’s core CX platform.

The product is unique in its tight integration of a presence on Facebook with resources commonly associated with the contact center, including access to the knowledge base and contact records that inform agents and customer service reps. Agents can respond directly to the wall postings or send messages directly on Facebook (Webchat is expected to be supported with formal release in November). They can also use the RightNow’s infrastructure to escalate an issue and attach high-priority to particularly “hot” issues.

We’re still in the early days of a long march to better engagement between firms, their customers and their prospects. For both cultural and technological reasons, companies customarily take baby steps toward better “listening” and customer engagement. By packaging lots of features and functions behind an “app” that ostensibly just adds a “Support” tab to the company wall, RighNow makes this small step for an enterprise into a great stride toward better customer engagement.

As picked up in the NYTimes’ blog a group of nerds were able to raise in excess of $25,000 to its “joindiaspora” funding efforts (in less than 10 days). Yet Diaspora* is by no means alone in trying to build an “open social graph”. Initiatives like Freenet (offering free, anonymous browsing), OStatus (the “anti-Twitter” for microblogging) and OneSocialWeb (an older, open alternative to Facebook) have all launched efforts to democratize social networking.

In the spirit of Recombinant Communications, we’re seeing an ever-broadening community of imaginative developers (self-described “nerds”) rushing in to exploit opportunities created when the category leader, Facebook, is perceived to be violating the unwritten rules governing both protection of privacy and control of personal information.

Diaspora* is a pretty good name. It evokes an image of long-time Facebook denizens cast out (rather than leaving by choice) by the new social order imposed upon the cyberpopulation. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of other Facebook users will likely stay put and carry out their normal business because that’s where they habitually go to find out what their friends are doing.

Facebook’s Lilliputian rivals will be spawning grounds for innovation which can only benefit the development of better social networks. They have already gone a long way toward drawing attention and promoting more intelligent discussion and service development around the most appropriate applications of standards and APIs that govern the exchange of information and messages across multiple networks and social graphs.

Opus Research’s clients are most interested in how more efficient control of personal information can promote better user experience as people look for interesting things to do nearby, shop for products or services, or seek technical support for or advice about the products they have already bought. Our suspicion is that the business model that underlies open, social networking will be underwritten by enterprises that want to have stronger links with their customers. They’re not buying or exploiting activity streams (as Facebook appears to be doing) as much as they are providing a platform for more efficient company-to-customer conversations.

These are the contact centers of the future.

Unified Communications, iPhone apps and dashboards for enterprise VoIP are slipping into the category of “commodity.” What caught the eye of the digirati was a Facebook app called 8×8 Connect, which was introduced on the second day of the ITExpo. Here’s where Om Malik invites readers of GigaOm to “Call Me via VoIP on Facebook. In the article, Om conducts a test drive of the new service (which can be accessed and launched here). Om notes that the service “could be especially helpful for small business owners and consultants, who could use it as a way to generate interest in the products/services they’re selling.”

Om also mentions that it could be improved by making it “more personal.” His example would be to allow users to upload their own picture, avatar or brand so that it can be displayed with the user’s phone number (I’d call this part of the movement toward better Caller ID). He also sees advantages to being able to embed the “Call Me” button on a company or individual’s “fan pages.”

My trial went a little differently. I followed the link from GigaOm to the “8×8 Connect” page on Facebook. Then things started to go awry. Being the unintentional demo breaker that I am, I accidentally mis-typed my email address and (probably because my proper name is much more than “Om Malik”) my “8×8 Connect” record and registration form is associated with another Dan Miller, who had been there before me and entered a different mailing address and a bogus phone number. Needless to say, I lost confidence in going any further and removed the app from my Facebook account. After doing so, I went back into the app to see if I could “fix” my mistake, but the record of my evil twin seems to be persistent.

I applaud 8×8’s effort to add click-to-call to social networking and hope this registration “bug” is just that – a fixable bug. However, one of the major challenges faced by solutions providers in the era of Recombinant Communications is to continue to introduce a steady stream of innovative services, but they need to do a better job of testing such services. Alternatively, they could just “do a Google” by calling every new offering a “beta.”

But Google’s approach to social search is quite different. As a pre-requisite, users must have a Google ID, populate a fairly extensive user profile and build (or import) a list of Contacts. Search results will consist only of content created by the people included in that Contact List. Thus, it is a searchable version of FriendFeed. Greg Sterling did this post on Screenwerk with a video from Google, gives a very good demonstration of the new service, which was officially introduced in “Google Labs” today.

By covering the story as a “Google versus Microsoft” catfight for real time data, the general media has missed an important message to end users. “Take Control of Your Metadata”. This can be the very development that leads Web users to discover their explicit power to shape their search results – based on both actively and passively provided indicators or interest, presence, friendships and trust. Whereas the blog posts and Tweets of Alpha Dog narcissists had been raw material for a Real Time Web, the new search model can constrain search to topics of interest from people you know and perhaps trust (in as much as they are in your contact list).

More importantly, when “status indicators” and “user profiles” become the grist of the online search mill, I believe it will give the general public more incentive to manage the metadata they are creating. It’s just a matter of hygiene. We’re getting previews of the nature of new profiles when services like Aardvark.com members to assign tags themselves with their areas or interest or expertise. That may always be a stretch. Yet it is clear that all of the real-time search engines are excellent at the sort of pattern recognition and detection that can pretty accurately assign tag clouds to your areas of interest and expertise for you.

As with most recombinant initiatives, a good bit of assembly is required. I’m just hoping that end-users become their best advocates as the ecosystem for real-time search takes shape.

All told, the number of active accounts on Vivox’s network exceeds 11 million (and has been reported as high as 15 million). This pales versus the Skype’s pyramid of 500 million registered accounts (with something like 45-60 million “active” users); however, if anything it demonstrates the ease at which online communicators can toggle over to talking with one another.

Back in the glory days of the first-generation “pay-per-call” services, GAB Lines (for “group access bridges”) were among the biggest money makers for premium service providers – some customers routinely ran up $300 monthly phone bills (which may mean little to wireless customers with multiple family members including data plans, but back then it was real money). These were the true “party lines” where anyone could dial in and chat for hours. Real world experience showed that “GAB calls” led to “DAK calls” – a billing/marketing referring to the propensity for GAB customers to call customer service and “deny all knowledge” (DAK) of making any such call. So it was that one of the most popular (and for the most part non-pornographic) services on the pay-per-call roster, hastened its demise.

Voice Chat on Facebook is destined to have a much more successful future. Although the company provided very little detail in its announcement, other than to call the service a “mashup” for Facebook, we believe it will be offered as a “free” feature enabling Facebook users to initiate voice-based chats with friends or selected groups. Vivox has already demonstrated its ability to scale its network in response to growing demand, and it will be interesting to see what revenue models emerge from offering the service, including the potential for businesses of all sizes to “chat” with their “fans” (meaning customers).

Other voice-based features are sure to follow and, in fact, already exist. These include the ability to update status by speaking over the phone, as well as transcription of stored (voicemail) messages. Opus Research’s forthcoming report on Mobile Speech applications will have assessment and commentary on the growing market opportunity and over two dozen firms – led by Nuance, Microsoft and Google – who are making it easier for both desk-bound and mobile Internet subscribers to use the spoken word to avail themselves of the multiple features and functions of popular sites like Facebook.