Doc Searls has an interesting post entitled The Soylent Web talking about the link between social networks and information exchange. The post links to a comment about the need for a Web of People.

When you can go to a people-web search engine, type in a keyword, and everyone in the world associated with that keyword comes up, complete with a means to contact them (if they wish to be contacted) then the people-web will have arrived.

This is the type of social communciations networks we foresee developing over the coming years. Perhaps it is my background in the collaboration space that continually leads me back to the integration of voice in other forms of collaboration applications. Social networks and VoIP are two powerful trends which will align at some point. This will just be one of the interesting new communications applications we can expect to see in the VoIP world.

I recently observed that one of the original product managers on Microsoft's Internet Explorer is now the CEO of a stealth start-up called Iota, which hopes to create the "Google of Voice". Observers might want to read The Secret of Google's Power to get a better sense about the real true power of the Google platform. The following excerpt cuts to the heart of the matter:

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

I have been pondering the idea of gPhone, delivered by Google. Perhaps others have as well.

While not much is known about Iota at this point, it appears that they are developing an applications development platform for the VoIP market. This is exactly what the VoIP market needs -- a platform that provides the underlying building blocks of VoIP, while enabling the applications developers to focus on the application specific features, integration and user interface. Remember, Mirabilis was able to leverage the existing Internet platform to create the hugely successful instant messaging application, ICQ.