Voxeo Talks

Have you ever wanted to quickly launch a call to a group of friends or colleagues? Say you want to get together for dinner (or a party) and rather than keep going around on IM or email you just want to talk to them all quickly? Or perhaps you are working with a project team scattered all over and as the deadline approaches you want to rapidly get all the team members together on a conference call?

As we are announcing today, a new Facebook application called “Party Line” does exactly that. Built by the folks at Equals, this application lets you create an unlimited number of “party lines”, each of which can have up to five members in it. You can either initiate the call from directly inside of Facebook or you can call 1-877-4-BUZZ-ME (1 877 428 9963) and simply select the number of the party line that you want to launch. The application then calls out to all members of the Party Line and… ta da… you are there in the conference call. Talk as long as you want… it’s free. No conference bridge numbers. No passcodes. Simple. Easy.

Want to try it out? All you need to do is (assuming you already have a Facebook account) go to:

www.equals.com/partyline

That address will automagically redirect you to the Facebook application page where you can simply add the application to your Facebook profile.

Once you have done that, you should be brought to the application page where you have one more step to do before you can get started. Click on the Advanced tab and you will see a place to get enter the phone number you want to use to make/receive calls (typically your mobile phone). Enter your number and press Verify. In a rather cool form of verification, the application will then call you and give you a code to enter into the verification box that pops up.

Now you can go back to the Party Line tab and just start creating party lines and adding in your Facebook friends. If they don’t have the application installed yet, they’ll be prompted to do so when you invite them.

Initiating a “Party Line” call can be easily done in either of two ways:

1. Call 1 877 4 BUZZ ME (1 877 428 9963). For one of the party lines you have created, you simply enter the number after a prompt and the call connects. For a party line created by someone else of which you are a member, you press “#” first and then the number of the party line. In both cases you can listen to the list of available party lines so you don’t have to remember the numbers.

2. Use the Facebook application interface. If you are logged into Facebook, you can just hit the big “equals” button to “Buzz Now! and start the call, as show here:
   

That’s it. After a brief sponsor message you are placed into the conference call with the other members of the party line and can talk for as long – or as little – as you want to.

Would you like to see it in action? Here’s a quick video tour:

We are rather thrilled to see this use of our platform by the folks at Equals. As far as we know, this is the first time a customer has built a Facebook app that uses our application platform, so we’re delighted to see it become available.

More than that, it’s a wonderful example of how someone can build a Facebook app based on the open standards of CCXML, VoiceXML and SIP. In particular, Call Control XML (CCXML) is being used to control all the call processing – and the conferencing. When someone calls in, CCXML is driving the overall call flow… initiating the calls to the other users and then bringing them into a shared conference. In turn, SIP is being used for all the connectivity out to the PSTN through our various service providers and VoiceXML is used for the the spoken dialogs you hear in the application. All around a pretty cool use of open standards in the midst of a Facebook application.

We’re also excited because while this application launched initially on Facebook, the Equals folks have built it in such a way that they will be able to move it to OpenSocial and from there allow it to be used on all the many other social networks that will support OpenSocial apps on their systems. They also have a range of other ideas to expand this application that we are looking forward to seeing as they roll those out.

Congrats to the team at Equals on this launch and we look forward to seeing what they do next. If you are on Facebook, please do check out the Party Line app and let us know what you think. (There is also documentation available if you would like more information about the application.) And if you want to learn more about how you could develop on our platform using open standards like I mentioned above, please check out our free developer accounts and software and learn how you can get started today.

Technorati Tags: applications, facebook, facebook applications, facebook platform, voxeo, equals, social networking, voip, voice, voice applications, voice mashups, sip, prophecy, ccxml, xml, voicexml, ivr, opensocial, party line, conferencing, collaboration

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Tags: ccxml, Facebook, sip

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