How badly do you want to be able to call your friends directly from your Facebook profile, without actually picking up your phone? A new technology company by the name of Ribbit Corp. hopes your answer to that question was anything other than “not at all,” since it showed off out a service earlier today that does just that. The technology aims to embed telephony in the software you use every day, to the point where it can be a mere Flash applet.
While Web-based telephony isn’t actually new, Ribbit is trying to set it apart from the other providers (Vonage and Skype) by trying to be open like Android. No, I don’t know, specifically, what that means, but buzzwords are always fun to throw around.
How and what consumer services Ribbit integrates with is all we care about, followed closely by how much it wants to charge. As it stands, I’m OK with not being able to call my friends from Facebook, especially since they’re all pretty much on AIM 24/7.