Yahoo asked me to come out to Palo Alto Monday, and get briefed on their planned phone service, integrated with Yahoo Messenger. I got the chance to meet Jeff Bonforte, newly dubbed as senior director of voice product management for Yahoo, formerly of SIPphone (the folks developing the Gizmo Project -- the open source alternative to Skype).

I listened to the product roadmap, and was unsurprised: they are definitely focused on kicking Skype, hard. The long term ("Voice 2.0") is about voice integration across the board in Yahoo. We'll see how that plays out. I think Yahoo has a real chance to displace Skype as the VoIP darling, given the number of Yahoo users out there.

Personally, I'd like to see more attention to the audio and video podcasting side of things. Or stated differently, I would like to see more attention to recording voice and video from desktop and handheld devices, and editing/publishing that.

Of course, high quality audio and video is critical, but publishing it is just as important -- at least to me.

[On a media sidenote: this story was supposed to be embargoed until Thusday, but Newsweek and others broke it early. So those of us thay played nice with the story got scooped!]