Google is simply blowing me away right now. They seem to have their hands into everything. I'm so curious to know if this business strategy will work. Then Google+ comes along and takes what initially appeared to be separate ventures and combines them into one. Then I read about WebRTC and I can't help but get very excited....and it's open source! What am I going to read next? Headline, Google intern cures cancer over the weekend.

The near simultaneous release of all this is also amazing. Launching one or two things, and making sure it doesn't break the entire infrastructure is hard enough under good circumstances. Rewriting pretty much everything at something the size of Google really is astounding.

I like this subtle jab at JavaScript developers: "...programming skills are required. However, usage of the Javascript APIs that call WebRTC in the browsers will only require typical web development skills."

Yes in today's world, I think it's a bit poor. I write a lot of javascript, c# (software) and php. There is nothing 'easier' about javascript. In fact, VS2010 being so good at debugging and with Resharper, developing javascript can be harder! The "WTF" factor goes up 10 folds. (I've only got praises for webkit's inspector/debugger though!)

Just to make it clear - WebRTC is at least 6-12 months away from being usable in any browser.

The first part has just landed in Chrome[1].

This isn't exposed to the browser in anyway yet, so the APIs need to be agreed on, build and released.

Even in Chrome, the best case for that is months, and that is for the unstable stream.

If you want to build cross-browser applications, hopefully WebRTC will be released as a plug-in. It is unlikely that will happen any quicker than Chrome integration though.

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/webrtc/blog/firststeptowardchr...

It does not seem all that impossible now, now that Skype has been integrated into Facebook. From what I hear, they have stripped down most of skype and provided javascript apis for the facebook web app.

Before that, I always used to wonder how could one take all of signaling protocol (like the monstrous SIP, XMPP etc) and media (RTP) and cram all of it into the browser.

Pretty different boats. Facebook/Skype requires a separate binary installation. Google Talk/Hangouts/etc currently requires Google's "Voice and Video plugin", which at least just integrates into Chrome rather than installing separate executables, but for the sake of this discussion, they're functionally equivalent.

Packing the necessary tools into a toolkit that a browser can utilize first-rate is, as you pointed out, a different challenge. Not sure what SIP or XMPP are "monstrous" though.

Different boats, I agree. Skype is an additional plugin I think, so you don't need to have skype installed on your device. But that's the whole point. Google is the new Microsoft, though probably not as much evil. They have wide interests in almost all areas from search engine, android, chrome os, social, browser etc. So they can really control and push what fits their needs.

Tomorrow if Facebook comes out with their own browser, they would surely push skype baked in, into the browser rather than make it an additional installation.

When I mentioned the word "monstrous", I meant that in terms of the implementation and code size. I am not sure of XMPP, but SIP I think is. There are tons of new rfcs, specs and drafts that have come up which one has to implement for effective interoperable SIP sessions.

> Not sure what SIP or XMPP are "monstrous" though.

Both SIP and XMPP are way beyond "monstrous", hundreds of specs, and most implementations are not really interoperable beyond the very basics. (XMPP is still barely at the level irc reached almost 20 years ago, and that is after ten years of and ever growing and changing list of specs, which is actually the problem).

Can someone please help me understand better what this actually means as a benefit for us? Does WebRTC in the browser mean i'll be able to do away with my asterisk server eventually should i choose to, and develop my own solution that works just in the browser, or am i way off track here?

Sounds good. Hope all the browsers (esp IE) add support for it.

I wonder how it compares with Flotype's[1] Now: https://github.com/Flotype/now

[1] YC W2011

I fail to see any comparison here.

WebRTC is a project building support for things like P2P and Device API support into modern browsers. This is so you could do things such as access a user's video camera through the Device API and establish a P2P stream with another browser, without using any Flash or installable plugins.

Now is just a JavaScript library that enables you to do RPC with browsers.

RPC != RTC

Besides no built in video and audio support?

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2678914