Thank you for some serious link-love

Wow - thanks to all of you out there for some serious link love: Ken Camp's Post, Jon Arnold's Post, Solomon Ige's Post, and Phone Boy's. As I told Ken, I sometimes feel like I'm designing in a cave, and never really know if anyone else cares. I absolutely love what I do for a living (and I know some of my clients are hoping I'm going to say that I would do it for free), but it's a pleasure to see someone else cares, too. Thanks.

What's even better, though, is that these bloggers have readers, and at least some of those readers are just like me : telephony guys trying to create cool things that people will use. Each of these guys recognizes that telephony engineers have a new tool in the box : mashups. And hopefully, because of this sort of light weight programming model (I call it the anti-IMS), the wider world of engineers have a new tool in THEIR box : telephony. Telephony was once heavy weight, now it's light weight. Telephony used to be capital intensive, now it's pay-as-you-go. Telephony integration used to mean that enterprises would buy telephony equipment and integrate it, now enterprises can integrate with hosted, online solutions. Telephony mashups provide the right sort of light weight programming models that finally lower the barrier to integrating telephony with applications that will allow all engineers, not just us deep telephony geeks, to include telephony in the application.

Sure, there are a bunch of tools in our tool box, but for me, mashups are a keeper.