Hot on the heels of last week’s Jingle announcement, comes Google’s release of LibJingle, an open API for their GoogleTalk service. Tim’s happy to see APIs like this opening up in time for our Emerging Telephony conference, where developers can get together and start mashing this stuff up. Tom Keating has written a good blog post on the topic, detailing what was released and looking forward to some of the possibilities.

The GoogleTalk API release just makes Norman Lewis’s comments in my recent interview with him seem all the more insightful:

Stewart: Which obstacles to innovation in internet telephony do you think will be removed in 2006, and which will take a longer time to remove?

Lewis: Emerging voice players such as Google and Yahoo are embracing open platform models in other parts of their businesses. It’s likely that their voice services will be opened in a similar manner, potentially enabling a period of real innovation around voice. This could parallel the rise of mash-ups we’ve seen this year that could further displace traditionally closed Telco VoIP efforts.