It is hard to look at Ribbit Mobile without comparing it to Google Voice. Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users a new phone number or they can use call forwarding to transfer calls from their mobile phones to Ribbit's platform. Ribbit Mobile also has quite a few features that Google doesn't offer, including the ability to make calls from within the browser.

More Features than Google Voice

As Ribbit Mobile is part of Ribbit's open VoIP platform, the service can even forward calls to your Skype, MSN or Google Talk account if you don't pick up your mobile phone. Whenever you miss a call or when a new voicemail arrives, Ribbit can also ping you by email, Skype, Google Talk or SMS. Through its partners, Ribbit offers widgets for popular start pages like iGoogle and social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Through these - as well as on the service's homepage - users can receive and place calls from their browsers. This is a feature that Google Voice doesn't offer yet.

GrandCentral, which Google bought and then transformed into Google Voice, offered some of the features that Ribbit Mobile now offers. Google dropped quite a few useful features like call chains from Google Voice's feature line-up, however.

Besides call chains, another nice feature of Ribbit Mobile is that you can choose which number will appear on your contacts' phones when you call, even if you are calling from your computer. Once you are on a call, you can also easily transfer calls from any device to another. Because of this, you can start a call in the web interface or iGoogle and then continue the call on your cell phone.

Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users the option to set up a new phone number for their Ribbit accounts. Users can search for a specific number and letter combination in these numbers. For now, Ribbit only offers numbers in select cities such as California and New York.

A service like Ribbit Mobile wouldn't be very useful as you couldn't easily import your contacts. Thankfully, users can import contacts from Plaxo and as an Outlook CSV file (Google Contacts can export an Outlook CSV file).

Caller ID 2.0

As Ribbit's CEO Ted Griggs and co-founder Crick Waters told us yesterday, the company wants users to look at Ribbit Mobile as a "personal customer relationship management (CRM) platform." To do so, Ribbit Mobile doesn't just display a caller's name and phone number. Users can also add notes to every call and connect their Ribbit address book with their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr accounts. Through this, the Ribbit team noted, conversations can now take place within a context.

Voicemail Transcriptions

Ribbit offers two levels of voicemail transcriptions. Free accounts come with automated transcriptions. Users with professional accounts - which are free during the beta period - can also choose to have 'business-class' level transcriptions, where a human checks the computer-transcribed text and edits it.

Ribbit for Developers

Because Ribbit is an open platform, developers can use the service in their own applications. Ribbit already features five apps in its app store, including an SMS widget, an Adobe AIR app for checking voicemails and a conference widget. Ribbit also plans to launch its own mobile applications for the iPhone and Blackberry platforms soon. Developers are free to charge for their applications and Ribbit also offers a profit-sharing program where developers will be paid if users use their applications.

Joining the Beta

Ribbit will slowly scale the service up over the next few weeks. The company will hand out new accounts on a first come, first serve basis. You can sign up for an account here. All service levels are available for free during the beta period, though Ribbit plans to charge for the pro accounts later on.

Skype's Antoine Bertout argues that this move to shut down Extras was inevitable as "not enough people were using them to justify our continued support of the Extras programme." We have to wonder, though, if killing off a good part of its third-party developer ecosystem is really the right thing to do. After all, applications like Pamela, Skylook, or Pretty May added important functions to Skype and made the software more useful for a larger group of users.

Of course, this is not necessarily the end of the road for third-party developers who really want to write applications for Skype. The company, however, will not actively promote these apps and they won't be certified. For developers, this means that they are now on their own and can't expect any more help from the company.

Skype itself is clearly making these decisions in order to trim unnecessary expenses from its books as its new owners are looking for ways to make the company operate more efficiently. It could also be that Skype plans to enable some of the services that the third-party Extras plugins currently offer in its own core client.

With the public API still being open, we are not ready to declare the death of the Skype ecosystem just yet, but developers will surely be wary of Skype and might just shy away from developing for a platform whose future looks uncertain.

If you want to save some extra money and you don't need Google Voice to forward any of your SMS messages to your phone because you're at your computer anyway, make sure you turn off SMS forwarding under Settings -> Phones -> Edit.

While Google Voice is still an invite-only service, Google is slowly opening the service up to more users. Apple, of course, is still 'reviewing' whether it will allow the Google Voice iPhone app into the App Store, but there can be no doubt that Google Voice has the potential to drive some revenue away from cell phone carriers. International calls are cheap, transcribed voicemails that are forwarded to your email are free, you can easily record calls, and you don't need to pay for SMS messages you receive. Over time, Google will surely add a few more features to Google Voice (and maybe bring back some features it dropped from GrandCentral's original feature set). Users still have to connect calls through the cell phone carriers' traditional phone network, but that's about the only service a user would need from AT&T and Co (besides a data plan, of course).

We have used Google Voice ever since it was still GrandCentral (Google acquired GrandCentral in July 2007) and couldn't be happier with the service, so here is our rundown of what you can expect once you get your own Google Voice number.

How Does it Work?

Just like GrandCentral did when it was still available, Google Voice (GV) will assign you a new number, and then you can set up GV to forward calls from this number to your cell phone, home phone, or office.

For calls within the US, GV also allows you to place free calls, though instead of running through a flash widget or a desktop app, GV will actually call your phone and then place the call, so you will still use your cell phone minutes. Google Voice also offers cheap international calls with prices that rival those of Skype and Vonage.

Nothing on your own phone changes, of course, so when you place a call, your home or cell phone number still appears on your friend's caller ID, though you can always opt to call your own GV number first and then connect the call from there.

GV features a Gmail-like, stripped down interface that puts transcribed voicemails and recent calls at the center of the screen, with the ability to also see recently placed and received calls, your contacts, and other standard features you would expect from a telephony app.

Our Favorite Features

• transcribed voicemails: whenever somebody leaves a voicemail, GV will transcribe the message as best it can (this only works for English right now). These transcripts are then forwarded to your email account and you can also opt to receive an SMS notification.
• listening in to voicemails: whenever you receive a call and decide to let it go to voicemail, you can also choose to listen in and even pick up the call if it turns out to be an important message. This feels just like the old days when answering machines with tapes were still a novelty.
• call screening: one neat option in GV is the ability to screen calls. If you activate this feature, callers will be prompted to leave their name once they call, and once you pick up the phone, GV will play the name back and you can choose if you want the call to go to voicemail or if you want to actually speak to this person. You can opt to let all unknown callers who are not in your Google address book go through this procedure or just those calls from callers who have blocked their caller ID.
• recording calls: at any time during a call, you can press 4 and the call will be recorded. This only works for calls you receive on your phone for now, and doesn't work for outgoing calls.
• conference calls: just ask participants to call your GV number and once more callers call in, you can just conference them in - this works for up to 4 callers.
• switching phones: if you want to switch phones during a call (say you took a call on your home phone and decide you want to take a walk and continue the call on your cell), just press * and all the other phones will ring.
• SMS: you can send and receive text messages from your GV account
• integration with Google Contacts
• it just works: the call quality is good, we didn't experience any outages during the last few months, and calls aren't dropped. GV does what it says it does, and it does it well.

But What About Making Calls from my Phone?

As we mentioned above, making calls from your own phone will still display your old caller ID, but at least if you have an iPhone, you do have the option to use GV Mobile, which provides a nice phone interface and comes in a free (iTunes link) and paid version (iTunes link).

A Few Things We Would Like to Change

• the ability to set your cell phone to display your GV number in the caller ID  - this is still a big barrier for users who might otherwise be willing to switch. As long as your old number still appears in the caller ID, others will continue to call you on that number and will continue to route around your fancy new GV account with all its bells and whistles.
• no call chains: you can't set one phone to ring first and then, when nobody picks that up, transfer the call to the next number (GrandCentral offered this feature)

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Thanks to this update, Mac users (who use the latest beta version) can now also finally share their screens with PC users, which wasn't possible until now.

Overall, while it works perfectly well, Skype's screen sharing features are pretty basic and allow users to either share the full screen or select a part of the screen they want to share. A number of third-party developers already offered Skype plugins that allow users to share their screens with their contacts. And quite a few of these offer a wider range of features than Skype's own solution, including white-board functionality.

The image of the screen is great, as one would expect. But in order to share a screen, a voice call has to be initiated, which might not always be what you really want to do, especially if you are like a lot of us here at RWW who often use Skype for text-only chats as well. Sadly, it also doesn't look like it is possible to share a screen with a group of contacts or a Skype room. For now, you will still need dedicated screen sharing programs like Yuuguu for this kind of functionality.

More New Features

Skype also added additional support for visually impaired users who use screen reading software, as well as birthday reminders that will alert you when it's one of your contacts' birthdays.

As always, we need to point out that this is beta software and you might still find some bugs in it. Overall, though, Skype's beta releases have generally been very stable. A full set of release notes is available here (PDF).

Today, many a virtual business can only run thanks to Skype's ability to bypass the expensive phone networks. Here at RWW, we use Skype extensively throughout the day, and while other products like Gizmo might offer a similar feature set, nobody else ever got the market penetration that Skype got thanks to its early start.

EBay

But besides all the technical innovation, Skype's biggest news day came in September 2005, when it was acquired by eBay for a staggering $2.6 billion dollars. It doesn't seem as if anybody ever really understood why eBay decided to buy Skype and go ahead with this deal - or why they ever offered this much money in the first place. eBay never integrated Skype into the rest of its business and it was never quite clear how they would do that anyway, besides giving potential buyers an option to connect with sellers through it. In recent months, rumors have flared up repeatedly that eBay was trying to sell off Skype.

Skype 4

The user interface of Skype 4, which is publicly available, but still in beta, is a radical departure from the previous versions and hasn't exactly received many accolades for its new design yet. Skype is trying to put more emphasis on 'conversations,' but in doing so, the company has abandoned the typical horizontal IM layout for one large window with your contacts list and conversations all in one. This tends to take up a lot of space, though you can pop out chat or call windows.

Overall, we are not big fans of the direction Skype is going in with this new version, but given that it is still in beta, hopefully some of the UI weirdnesses will have been addressed by the time it launches. In order to focus its business more, Skype also just announced that it will disable Skypecasts, Skype's ability to broadcast to a large group of listeners, effective September 1st.

For the next five years, Skype's Josh Silverman says that he wants to see Skype move towards 'liquid communication,' where neither device nor place matters.

There's also a problem of congestion. In densely populated areas, as more and more people set up home networks, throughput is dropping as the airwaves get cluttered. David Heinemeier Hansson posted today about noise on his urban wifi connection, and judging from the comments his post received, it's a common problem. The solution? Perhaps mobile broadband.

Moconews pointed to Ericsson’s marketing chief Johan Bergendahl, who said mobile broadband will supplant wifi hotspots as the preferred method of on-the-go web access. "Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era," he said. Moconews also pointed to a report that mobile broadband uptake is on the rise, and another report that city-wide wifi deployments are also growing -- perhaps indicating that wifi isn't ready to go away yet.

But let's just suppose that mobile broadband does become the dominant method of connecting to the Internet. Let's pretend that high cost, limited service territories, and speed barriers are overcome. What would the result be?

Perhaps the most interesting result would be that cellular voice networks would be forced to give way to VoIP, and services like Skype or JAJAH might be well positioned for a mobile broadband dominated world. With fast, reliable, and ubiquitous mobile broadband access, cellular voice plans would be irrelevant given cheaper VoIP options. We've already seen some voice-over-IP services target mobile users, such as JAJAH's iPhone optimized version.

That would be mean less costs for consumers -- no more free public wifi (presumably), but a slimmer cell phone bill and a single broadband connection that could cover mobile phone, web access, and landline telephone. Throw in a VoIP television service like Joost (which is starting to test live streaming this month) or Livestation, and the future might be one connection that covers all of your media and communication needs.

That simple future is a ways off, though. Mobile broadband isn't cheap, it isn't as fast as wired broadband, and it doesn't have the coverage necessary to be a truly reliable alternative to wifi hotspots (let alone voice networks). But is that future coming? Probably. HSPA+, which may arrive late this year, will offer speeds of up to 42 Mbps down and 11 Mbps up, which is significantly faster than my 20/2 Mbps cable line, and astronomically faster than the iPhone's current EDGE network (which is around 240 kbps down).

There are a lot of barriers to overcome -- not least of which, how to handle billing consumers when roaming on other networks and how to make the various competing standards play nice (or get networks to conform to a single standard). But once those issues are solved, fast, cheap, ubiquitous mobile broadband may be on the horizon.

When do you think mobile broadband will be fast enough, cheap enough, and ubiquitous enough to supplant wifi? Will that ever happen? If it does, what other side effects will we see? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

One of the most commonly requested features by Skype forum users is the ability to use the telephony tool from a USB flash drive. As yet, Skype has not got around to making an official portable version and even the John Haller PortableApps website, which has made portable versions of everything from Mozilla Firefox to Sudoku, doesn't seem to be in any hurry to make a portable version of Skype either.

The reluctance is inexplicable, because a portable version of Skype could take off in a big way due to the enormous popularity of USB flash drives. For a start, businesspeople on trips could plug their portable Skype into computers which don't already have the Skype application downloaded, in order to make contact with the office or clients. Tourists could also plug their USB drives into internet cafe computers and run portable Skype to call home or keep in touch with friends all over the world. Being portable, any identifying information that Skype produces would be written onto the USB stick and not on the host computer, which is ideal for people who are not inclined to log into their Skype accounts on a computer they don't know or trust, for fear of leaving behind sensitive information.

However, it IS technically possible to make an unofficial portable version of Skype yourself and here's how you do it.

Next, inside the Skype Portable folder, make another new folder and name it "data". Inside the data folder, open a new file with Microsoft Notepad.    Name the file "skype.bat" and inside this notepad file, place the following line: skype.exe /datapath:"Data" /removable . Save and close.

Move the entire Skype Portable file over to your USB flash drive. Congratulations, you now have a working portable version of Skype which can be run from a USB drive. A bit rough and ready, but it does the job.

Considering how easy this process is, it's mystifying why Skype is dragging their heels bringing out an official portable version of their software. It's true that there is a portable version pre-installed on the SanDisk U3 Cruzer Smart Drive, but what is really needed is an all-purpose portable version which can be used on all USB drives, not just the U3. The U3's exclusivity is a lot like Microsoft forcing you to use their software by having it pre-installed at the factory - and that doesn't bode well for user choice and freedom.

Mark O’Neill is a freelance writer, editor and blogger. He can be contacted on Skype via the username camelot2302