Fixing Group Communication: Building the Social Phone

When it comes to voice, the tools we have today to communicate as a group are barely adequate. Some have argued that they're deeply broken. There's all this data about us, who we are (our Facebook page), what we're doing (Twitter), our availability (IM), and the people we know (Plaxo, LinkedIn,...) There are all these means of communication (email, chat, voice, wikis, conference calls, webex). But how do we put it all together to work for us? People with related interests (a business, an open source community, an NGO with members around the world) can get organized to serve incoming communications requests and reach out to their audiences better than they do today. In the corporate world, when this communication is highly organized and structured, it's referred to as a call center. But what about small businesses? What about distributed teams? What about knowldege workers trying to get stuff done? The tools we need to build for this communication to be fluid will have to break with the existing paradigms and leverage the intrinsic advantages of computers (I/O, data management, long memories), but at the same time, need to be sensitive to the social conventions that we've developed over the last 130 years since the phone was invented.