This was the original 10×10 Voxeo booth our Community Evangelists traveled with in 2001.

For the first time in 3 years, Skype was down today – and as Dan York writes, this is still in the process of slowly coming back online. A ton of articles were written today, mostly all pointing back to Skype’s blog post or status update, which most importantly said THIS POST about the Skype Outage.

My post Why Choose Tropo over Twilio caused quite a stir on Hacker News last week.  The resulting comment storm still hasn’t quieted completely.  The debate continued on to the VOIP Users Conference Podcast, where I was a guest along with Twilio CTO Evan Cooke in a podcast called When Clouds Collide.

Personally, I was inspired by the discussion, and put together this short animation to help explain some of the finer points:

Before everyone goes crazy:

Here’s the article where Dave McClure was quoted as saying “Open is for losers“.  And here’s where he was quoted saying “Fuck that noise” in response to Twilio criticism (or if that link goes away…here’s a nice Fuck That Noise screencap)

If you have trouble viewing the YouTube version, you can always go to the source:  Tropo vs. Twilio

A few weeks ago I was in Portland at the CivicWebs Hackathon talking with Amber Case and Aaron Pareki when Amber asked me why Tropo is better than Twilio.  She acknowledged that while she and Aaron love Tropo and built their GeoLoqi app on Tropo’s API, a lot of other people seem to like Twilio.   “So why is Tropo better?” she asked.

I responded with all the certainty, aloofness and charm I could muster: “Because we are!”

For most normal people, that answer might suffice, but Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist.  It’s hard to win her over with just charm.  So I started laying out some of the reasons why Tropo is just plain better, and I figured rather than just keep them between me and Amber and Aaron, I’d share…

1) Features – Twilio for pranks, Tropo for business

This is where Tropo really blows Twilio away, and even Twilio’s own people acknowledge it.  At an API vendor shootout session at Internet Telephony Expo earlier this year, Danielle Morrill, Twilio’s head of marketing, said that Twilio would never be able to keep up with Tropo on features.

Twilio is great for making prank phone calls

Tropo offers a ton of advanced features that Twilio just can’t match: Voice recognition, SIP connections (critical for integration with other VoIP systems), Skype integration, instant messaging, short codes, hosting, numbers in 41 countries, speech in multiple languages, and a host of other things.

Furthermore, Tropo is a unified API. The days of needing one app for voice calls, another for SMS and a third for conferencing are over.  The same code you use to say something over the phone can also respond via SMS, IM, and Twitter.

2) Tropo’s Extreme Support

Twilio works on a credit system that requires developers to pay to play.   Tropo is and always will be 100% free for developers.  No credits, no limits on minutes, no ads played to you or your callers.  Every developer gets 24×7 support from engineers that know how to write code.  Paying customers measure their response times in minutes.  Our support team is consistently ranked the highest in customer service and satisfaction, at the top of not only our industry, but above all other software and telephony companies.

3) Scalability, Reliability and Portability

Twilio’s service is based on Asterisk, a free and open source telephony framework and runs on Amazon’s EC2 network.

Tropo runs on Voxeo’s SIP Cloud, the largest worldwide voice application host. Voxeo has been running phone+web applications for 10 years.  Because Voxeo’s been doing this stuff for so long they know that business customers demand security and reliability, which is why Voxeo manages their own datacenters that connect directly to major carriers and delivers tens of millions of voice minutes a day for the largest companies in the world, including half the Fortune 100.

Portability is another factor.   If someone develops an app on Twilio, they’re pretty much locked in to Twilio.  Hopefully it will be a happy marriage, but what happens if they want to switch providers?   Tropo, on the other hand, can be run in your own network.   You can even run Tropo on Amazon EC2 (if you want to).

If you haven’t tried out Tropo, you should give it a whirl. Here’s a great tutorial to help you get started: How to build a Twitter Bot using Tropo and JavaScript

Related Post:  Twilio vs. Tropo AKA A little more noise for Dave McClure

I was a guest on Chris Matthieu’s Rubyology podcast today.   We talked about the upcoming AdhearsionConf 2010 in San Francisco August 14-15 2010. (among other things)…

You can jump to the Rubyology site or listen below:

Rubyology 86: Adhearsion Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Tropo just announced a new release today, with some significant new additions for web developers.  If you’re looking to launch any kind of an interactive application that reaches beyond a website, you should check it out.  Tropo now has:

• Twitter Support: You can now assign a Twitter name to your application and customers can interact with the app by simply sending a Twitter message to that name. Check out this post: How to Add Twitter Support to a Tropo App
• International Support: New international phone numbers, speech recognition and text-to-speech.
• SMS Support: One set of code to support voice, SMS and Tweets.
• IM and Chat: The same code will also support most Instant Messaging Clients such as AOL, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft.

Best of all, it’s complete FREE to develop and test your apps.  When you’re ready to launch into production, it’s just a click away.

Tropo Adds Twitter and goes International « The Tropo Blog.