Smith On VoIP

This is an update on an older story about the partnership between Six Apart and SIPphone. According to Kevin La Ruse, SIPphone’s VP of Marketing, “Gizmo Project for LJ Talk” went live late Friday. Here is some more information about Gizmo Project for LJ Talk.

LJ Talk

Over the summer, we’ve been working on a service that can integrate some of the best parts of LiveJournal into something many of you (and us!) use: instant messaging. Several thousand users have been using it already in its beta stage. Today we’re officially launching LJ Talk, in partnership with Gizmo Project, available to everyone with an LJ account.

It’s an instant messaging service that’s implemented using the Jabber protocol, which is an open system that allows us to connect to other networks, like Google Talk, Gizmo Project, jabber.org, Earthlink, and others. It’s also connected to your LiveJournal account:

* Your Jabber ID and Password is the same as your LiveJournal login
* Your roster (”buddy list”) is automatically filled with your mutual friends
* Your buddy icon is your default userpic
* You can post to your journal by IMing Frank, the robot goat.
* Coming Soon: integration with our notifications system

You can connect to LJ Talk using any Jabber IM client. We have a list of some popular clients available. If you’re not sure which one to get, check out Gizmo/LJ Talk. The folks at Gizmo Project have worked with us to create an integrated client. This combines the already-existing functionality of voice posting through their network (oh, and International users can voice post with it too), all of the LJ Talk functionality, and all the features that they provide, too.

For more information about LJ Talk, check out our FAQ.
EDIT: Some of you have asked us for a way to hide your LJ Talk ID from your profile entirely. We’ll be working on doing that over the next week or so, so stay tuned.

Live Journal is one of the most popular online communities and it is great to see Gizmo Project being utilized by so many who may have never had any previous interaction with the product, or VoIP. It will be interesting to see how other online communities and social networking sites decide to integrate VoIP and Presence software in the near future.

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