3rd Great Protocol

I met a guy named Vint Cerf moons ago when I was schlepping routers to ISPs. He had an ISP named Cerfnet in San Diego. I had the pleasure of meeting him once, but mostly dealt with his guys Klaus and Larry. Not having known Vint from Adam (ok, I was very new to all this then), I perceived Vint just as I did any other ISP owner. I had no idea what he had done, and certainly not who he would ultimately become.

It seemed a couple years ago Cerf declared SIP the 3rd 'great protocol'; great meaning that it would greatly change lives and economies. The 1st protocol being TCP/IP and the 2nd being HTTP-obviously huge life and economy changing developments. Those in the comms world know SIP already, but what it eventually means to consumers is what really matters. With HTTP we have the URL. With SIP we have the URI. The URL points to a web address and the URI will eventually be my catch-all address for everything...phone #, e-mail address, IM, fax, video, etc. I'll eventually have the means to control who gets to contact me and how. Of course today, not everyone is SIP enabled yet (like Skype), but everyone knows that in order for all this to work, networks need to be SIP enabled (like GoogleTalk). Once all these means of communcations are SIP enabled, the various islands that are comms providers need to peer (kind of like the early days of the Internet).

Long story short, significant development and cooperation needs to come together before consumers get the full potential of the 3rd great protocol. Consider this the real promise and future of IP communications in any case. What Buzzage is ultimately doing is taking the future of IP communications, and applying it where it matters TODAY-to our existing and most ubiquitous form of communicating.