Matt’s Cuppa

Web telephony service Jaduka has launched a bunch of new tools that make it easy to initiate telephone to telephone calls over the web.

Web-initiated calling doesn’t seem to have the "wow" factor that it had when GrandCentral first hit the virtual pavement. Maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing though. As services like Jaduka become more and more integrated into the web browsing experience, the line blurs between what is web and what is not. It could become quite commonplace to visit a band’s website, listen to their demo online, view their tour schedule, and click a button that initiates a call to their agent or scheduler. Or take a daycare provider’s site that shows a webcam feed of the play area, a microblog featuring short updates throughout the day, and a button that initiates a telephone call to the provider.

You can see that a feature or service such as this doesn’t often become "useful" until after the ”wow’ factor has worn off. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before click-to-call really does become a feature rather than a service. How long will it take before I can visit eBay or Amazon and click-to-call the seller or the customer service department? Or visit my car dealer’s website and click to schedule and oil change? How long before this is built into the Blogger and Wordpress platforms? And how about this? Click-to-call on government websites like the IRS?

There’s a current trend of integration on the internet. (Take a look at the key features on Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8 web browser, for example.) But the next logical step is integration of the internet. The outcome will be an internet that doesn’t stop at the borders of a webpage. That is, you won’t be able to tell when something is "on the internet" and when something isn’t. With the integration of more "offline" features, like telephone conversations, with our online experiences, we are headed toward an ubiquitous internet experience. And the next step in the progression is a whole lot of little buttons scattered around the internet that say something like "Call Me".