There’s a great new post by Chris Holland at The Broadband Daily on the potential of SIP or Session Initiation Protocol. SIP is currently being used by some VOIP providers and can provide a path for IM, Voice and Video as well as file transfer. The beauty is that it’s realtime unlike email. However just like email, it’s quite easy to use.
A SIP address looks just like an e-mail address. It uniquely identifies an Internet user, and encapsulates all information needed to attempt to get in real-time touch with them.
The ramifications of this protocol are far reaching.
Until SIP came along, it was only possible to easily get in real-time touch with somebody within closed, proprietary ecosystems: the traditional telephone system, ICQ, AOL Instant Messaging, Yahoo Instant Messaging, MSN Instant Messaging, Skype, CU Seeme, to name a very few. Each one possesses its own separate concept of a user%u2019s identity and proprietary communications protocols. Users of those closed systems can only communicate with other users of the same system. As a result, entering the real-time communications field was only restricted to a small resourceful elite.
Thanks to open standards and protocols such as DNS, SIP, and SRV records, just about anybody can now become a provider of real-time communications while enabling their members to be globally reachable on the Internet.
SIP allows real-time communications to follow the same adoption path as e-mail. [Broadband Daily]