Ernie Visions

At lunch today, I was trying to tell some geeky friends what Ernie
was going to be. It was a good experience, because they were geeky,
but not necessarily next-generation geeky. Here's the tag line I
came up with: Ernie wants to be the Apache of communications.
Imagine the tens, and probably hundreds, of thousands of users,
integrators and consultants that take Apache and create web
applications with it. They add value by integration, custom web page
development, whatever. The basic point of Apache isn't that it's an
application, but that it enables them. Ernie is just like that, but
for real time communications. By real time communications, I mean it
will cover not only voice, but IM and presence.

As part of the Ernie movement, we need to come up with a number of
applications that come off the shelf. I like doing a voice form, a
presence based routing application and maybe voice mail. We need a
good, open source voice mail program, don't you think? I should
probably poll this.

One more thought for the future - wouldn't it be cool if the entire
interface to Ernie was a web page? You could log in, load your
script, run it and test it. If you could do that, then we could
setup trial Ernie servers so that developers could log in, create
applications, and test from their desktops. That would be too cool.