New product reviews are a staple of the PC trade press and the Web 2.0 blog world.

But what about us telecom-folks? It’s not often you see hands-on reviews of telephony services.

But that’s about to change… we’re going to start publishing a new type of story in this blog that we’re calling:

At Your Service

The stories — part review, part behind-the-scenes stories — will take a look at new telephony services (weighted heavily to Web 2.0/Telephony 2.0 services). We’ll show how they work for the end user, talk to the developers/service creators about how they were built and provide a look into the service creator’s Toolbox for the platforms, tools and APIs they used to build the application or service.

If you’d like to have your telecom-related service reviewed, email me at rkarpinski AT telephonyonline DOT com.

I’ll be looking for cool services to review; hope to hear from you.

Ever wondered if that suspicious guy in seat 22a might be a terrorist? Ask him to join a group chat on the matter. How about that attractive woman (or man, as may be the case) in seat 11b, might they be single? Shoot them a ping. How about the person in front of you that’s reclined their seat into your lap, could them maybe straighten up? You can always knee them until they get the message, but may a polite instant message would do the trick as well.

Check out this very well-done video from WSJ.com’s Tech Diary video blogger Andy Jordan, courtesy of the Journal’s All Things Digital blog, about a new group messaging application to be found on the seat-backs on Virgin America flights.Take a look at this odd yet compelling plane-app before it shows up on your flight as well someday.

Interesting post today from Marc Canter, who runs social networking vendor Broadband Mechanics on an important question for service providers to really come to terms with: is social networking a business or a feature?

Or taking it to the next level: will social networking startups like Facebook, MySpace and others be able to keep their users and build a business around them; or will social network components like friending, poking, friend content feeds and more proliferate as features that users expect, and take advantage of, in ALL the software they use in the future.

Canter’s vision, and the vision of his company, is the latter:

If you look at the top of our corporate web site - you’ll see the phrase ‘bringing social to software’. Its our positioning saying “sure we can buid you a stand alone social network - but we can also add social features to the web site you have already”.

This idea has important implications for carriers and service providers aiming to play Facebook catch-up. For starters, if social networking sites don’t survive as destination sites, there may be nothing to “catch-up to.” It would be like trying to catch-up with AOL or Prodigy. more

Welcome to Telephony’s Telephony 2.0 Weblog.

What’s this all about?

Here’s a handy buzzphrase list to get a sense of what we’re talking about here: Web 2.0; mashups; social networks; SOA; IMS; cloud OS; Google / Yahoo / Amazon as hybrid datacenter / communications / content providers; gadgets; widgets; telco 2.0 biz models; competition; unbundling; cost-based pricing; etc. etc…

Basically, as we say in the tagline, the intersection of Web 2.0-style technologies and services; IP communications and its impact on the traditional PSTN telephony market; and the emergence of a whole slew of new competitors, including more competition-minded telcos.

If you are tracking these topics — and who in the traditional telecom industry isn’t — consider this blog a place to track the latest trends, keep up with breaking news and talk with your peers about these important topics.

Thanks for joining me.

Feel free to drop me an email anytime at rkarpinski AT telephonyonline DOT com.