I just got off a conference call where some of the participants had to gather together in a room and use a speaker phone. Because the way it had been set up in advance, we were limited to 5 lines on the call. This is not at all surprising, of course -- its how most conference calls are. I was however struck anew by the brokenated horrorfulment that is the conference call because this one was hosted by the Library of Congress. A Government agency, needing some outside counsel, could not schedule a conference call without specifying in advance how many people would be in attendance. Think what that would feel like in this medium: "Thank you for choosing to host your mailing list with Yahoo Groups. What is the maximum number of subscribers that will be on this list?" "Creating #python on irc... How many users will be on this channel?" "Welcome to the Atom Wiki. You will only be able to see this wiki in read-only mode, as the creator set the participant cap at 100." Every now and again, obvious things strike me anew: We have a huge mismatch between the potential of voice and the fact of the phone system because the phone system is almost literally anti-social. Having a party? Great -- just make sure you cap attendance in advance, and distribute lots of hard-to-remember login information beforehand. The current regulatory argument for treating voice over the internet (VoIP) like the traditional phone system is the old canard "If it walks like a duck..." The problem with this view is that VoIP _doesn't_ walk like a duck -- when broad use of voice over the internet finally arrives, it won't make people specify in advance how many people should be on a conference call, or require some central facility to set it up. The press often focusses on the ways VoIP is cheaper than regular telephony, but that doesn't hold a candle to the ways the internet is better than the phone system. We've barely even imagined ways of integrating voice into social software, because the one model we have for handling voice at scale has trained us to tolerate ridiculously hard group-forming.