Today’s Telephony 2.0 Reading List:

• Amazon Adds Audible To It’s Digital Empire
• Amazon Web Services: Bigger Than Amazon.com

Telco Take: Amazon continues to impress. From selling books online, it now delivers a wide variety of digital goods including audio books, music (no-DRM MP3), video (Unbox) and more. Plus its Web services platform and cloud services (storage, database) have set the stage for the company to further spread its wing beyond inventory-addled physical e-commerce.

• Jangle Powering Anonymous Sex on Plenty of Fish

Telco Take: How’s that for a salacious headline? Eventually, Web-embedded click-to-call VoIP will take hold. Online dating sites seems a likely spot, though the “creeper/stalker” factor could be high. Of further interest is the market for “adult” content — saw a story on the iPhone becoming the iPorn phone today. What will be the operator share of those “sordid” but inevitable revenues?

• Why Does Twitter Go Down?
• The Rise of Twitter as a Platform For Serious Discourse
• Distributed Twitter Alternative: Prologue

Telco Take: Microblogging service Twitter has become hugely popular with the Web-set, but it’s centralized nature makes it hard to keep up and operating — especially in crunch traffic times. Wouldn’t it be nice to have QOS and performance guarantees? But those are telco concepts! Look for the “five 9s” telecom and “good-enough” Web worlds begin to collide as Web services become more mission-critical (or at least cause frustration when they disappear). The alternative, such as the WordPress folks are trying above, is a distributed, P2P alternative to Twitter. But such architectures present their own problems.

Consumer VoiP Services Compared (LucaFiligheddu.com)
Rebtel comes out on top for cost and usability in making voice over IP call from U.S. to Italy via a mobile phone (no PC clients involved).

Facebook Buying Plaxo? (Venture Beat) - Not So Fast (TechCrunch)
A move that would focus less on social network features and more on combining address books and friend lists into a powerful Web-based unified directory/profile service.

IMS vs. Web 2.0 (OpenGardens)
Blog post asks all the right *service* questions about IMS, mainly: if Web services are standard, universal and cheap, what’s the pull for IMS?

Who Will Operate the Cloud (News.com)
Question raised: can an “IT arms supplier” - IBM, HP, Sun — also run a network services clouds? My question: can a telco run a network services cloud?

More Google Queries Get Google Maps (NYTimes)
Data-driven proof (300% increase in search queries returning with a Google map as top return) of how Google hopes to leverage dominance in one area (Web search) to try to take over other key areas, including directory services/yellow pages and mobile, location-based advertising.

Facebook’s Real Problem: Monetization (Dave McClure)
Key quote: A service isn’t a real *platform* until it makes — actually until it MINTS — money. It took Google four years to start up its mint, now running like clockwork. Facebook is dominating as Google did, but how will it create revenue for itself and its partners (Google’s “stickiness” is due to the “Google economy” — all the various advertisers, micro-publishers, etc. that suck on the Google teet).