Design in Flight mk2

25 August 2005

Design in Flight relaunches, publishing all its old content online – and publishing its new content online. The subscription model has been replaced by a donation model, except for back issues. It’s probably the way it should have been all along, and I’m certainly likely to pay the $10 for the back issues having read more of them.

I swear, if one more media organisation refers to Google Talk as a telephony service I will scream. It’s an IM client which happens to have VOIP capabilities. Just like iChat. Just like lots of other things which came before it. Skype is a real internet telephony client, and it appears to have received almost no press as a result of the big-Google-announcement, comparisons instead being drawn to MSN Messenger. Which is a real shame, because not much can touch Skype as a real internet-telephony provider. And it’s also reasonably not-evil. Still, it shows how much power the Google brand now wields.

Height of stupidity: last night’s Evening Standard headline (not online): PHONE CALLS GO FREE ON GOOGLE. I’m surprised the spool hasn’t picked up on this.