Voice on social networks off to slow start

First came a wave of service launches, as voice-over-IP providers tried to catch the social networking wave by embedding their services into popular social networks like Facebook.

Now comes the first wave of results, and the numbers aren’t pretty. While popular Facebook apps like music service iLike garner millions of users, the average voice-based application widget on the site is mired in the thousands, if not hundreds, of users.

The numbers come from a series of posts this week among telecom and VoIP bloggers, including Alec Saunders, Jon Arnold and Om Malik.

Deft Labs, maker of AppHound, a Facebook app analytics tool, ran a keyword search for VoIP and voice apps on the service and found less than 500,000 installs for all voice-related Facebook widgets with 11,615 daily users (or 2.7 percent of the Facebook audience). According to Deft Labs, the “Call Me On Skype” Facebook app leads the way with more than 100,000 installs while “VoiceMail” has about 12,000 installs and “Telephone” just 2800.

The aforementioned Saunders, CEO of Iotum, which offers its own Facebook app – enabling free group conferencing calling via the site – said in a blog post that the numbers aren’t surprising. Too many widgets focus on cheap calling rather than enhanced functionality, he said.

“The vast majority of VoIP applications on Facebook are simple click-to-call minute-stealers,” according to Saunders. “So it's not really a surprise that minute-stealers are having a tough time. In fact, I'll go further — anybody who believes that users will really fire up a PC and log into Facebook to make a call when you can just pick up the phone and call for pennies, is deluding themselves.”

Getting accurate numbers for Facebook app users is more of an art than a pure science, but even as a rough count, it’s clear that, given the plethora of messaging options on Facebook today (including the standard posting a message on a friend’s page), clicking out to a voice connect – even if it’s free or low-cost – isn’t a priority for most users there.

Still, VoIP click-to-call widget makers such as Jangl and Jaxtr are finding success – and bigger numbers – elsewhere, claiming millions of overall users.

So is Web click-to-call a dead-end? It may be too early to make a final call, but early returns – and on the Web, early returns are often all you need to separate the hits from the misses – don’t look very promising.