So I saw a discussion thread earlier today comparing Mumble to the forthcoming TeamSpeak 3. Admittedly at first, I was slightly worried – I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into hosting Mumble, and I have a roadmap in my head for helping it gain a better market share later on… and my kneejerk reaction was to see TS3 (which was initially thought of as vaporware because it’s been “coming” for years now, but apparently the “date” is now set for New Year’s Eve) as a threat to that.
On the whole though, I think it’ll be good. We’ve always done well at niche markets, and if anything the release of TS3 will hopefully “thin the herd” of hosters a little bit.
It’s also an opportunity for fresh ideas for features, so I thought I’d document the few things I’d like to see borrowed:
Friends/Foes: Mumble 1.2 has a friends list, but it doesn’t really do too much yet. I’d like to see it improved upon, but also the “foe” option added which would essentially just auto-mute the person when they’re in the same channel as you. Personally, my wife and I would use this feature on each other – because we game near each other, hearing the other person’s voice twice is quite annoying… so we’ll typically mute each other, but upon a reconnect to the server, it has to be repeated.
URL Logger: Stemming from using it back in the days of mIRC, I don’t really think it needs to be explained why this would be a great addition – and probably not hard to add either. I might even do it myself for my first adventure into QT4 programming!
Spatial Sound: For games that have support for it, Mumble’s 3D positioning trumps TS3′s “Spatial Sound” – but for games that don’t, and for non-gaming purposes, a plugin or a feature in Mumble core that doesn’t connect to any game but instead allows the user to arbitrarily position players where they want would be a great addition.
Other than that, and the possibility of it being a little bit cleaner, I really don’t see TS3 being that huge of a threat to Mumble. Quality is effectively a non-issue when dealing with wide-band codecs, but for absolute sticklers… Mumble’s out in front (CELT allows you to stream music over Mumble at fantastic quality).
I may have to adjust my pricing a little bit to compete with what I’m sure will be an influx of other hosts offering TS3 services… we had planned on offering it ourselves, but I think I’ll stick with the niche instead, and I’ve always had a soft spot for open-source software, particularly if it’s BSD licensed.
I’ve not quite reached the pinnacle of ecommerce fulfillment, but it’s growing steadily. We were for a time making pretty reasonable contributions to Mumble via SourceForge, but we had to upgrade our Dallas Server which ate up most of the profits again so we’re still working our way up. 
