WebRTC World happened last week, and the great majority of presenters came from the world of telecom. Since I have a Bell head myself, I am not one to complain, but it did strike me odd that a strategy that Google (News – Alert) introduced was now being used by session border controllers everywhere.

Fortunately, at DevCon5 we are going to see the Web side of developments perspective on the use of WebRTC. Sumit Amar from Electronic Arts is going to discuss his viewpoint about implementations, and Dr. Luis Lopez is going to wake us up to the great things happening with the Kurento open source initiative.  

The Web has been a very different model than anything we ever developed before. When Tim Berners-Lee came up with the concept of the distribute Web (25 years ago), it stood traditional broadcast and star models on their heads and even messed with every other architecture being pushed in the data world.  

The Web was to be distributed and Jeffersonian in its approach to communication.  No one in charge, everything could link together: clearly this was not a network engineer’s vision of optimization. However, it matched well to the way people worked and caught on very quickly.

But as more and more traditional content is delivered across the Internet, more and more traditional architectures began to take hold.  Content Delivery Networks, firewalls and session controllers emulated front end processors, etc.

The beauty of WebRTC is that it’s the Web itself.  It is not going to be designed to support a broadcast model but an interactive one, where websites can engage their customers with speech, dialogue, interaction beyond today’s chat on-line or call me push  buttons.

In fact, I keep waiting to see the WebRTC ad words campaign where you can dial rather than click on other people’s sites.

I expect I will hear about this idea from Francis Ma of Google when he presents at DevCon5.  If he does not, I will ask him.

TokBox (News – Alert) has been doing amazing things with Major League Baseball and other brand names.  Acision is the king of messaging worldwide, so it will be interesting to see how it incorporates SMS to WebRTC.  OnSiP and Respoke have strategies that go beyond traditional telecom and may give us insight about how to deliver rapidly in this cloud-based online world.

Please feel free to join us as we explore how the Web will talk, call and text not person to person, but as site to community and, of course, to people.