I recently wrote a blog about the emergence of applications on the iPhone. With the ability to run Skype over a Wifi connection, there’s less reliance on a single carrier — something that puts another nail in the coffin of telcos.

But with Webot, it’s not just calls that are getting changed. Built by a bunch of streaming and media heavyweights in stealth over the last year or so, the company makes a service that delivers all your media, from all your machines, to any device. That means you can listen to your music online. Or you can play it on an iPhone (and presumably an iPod Touch) from anywhere in the world.

What’s behind the system is a media delivery network, searching and indexing, and one or more desktop agents (dubbed Mediabots) that collect your personal media for delivery.

I’ve played with it on an iPhone and it’s pretty sweet — works well (though, as Om Malik points out, it works better over Wifi than Edge) and looks like a native iPhone app. The web-based app, which offers a lot more navigation complexity, is also a decent music player.

What Webot’s after is trying to fix the problem of media clutter. I have copies of MP3’s in several places. They’re all legit; I’m kinda rabid about buying music rather than stealing it, though I much prefer DRM-free Beatport to Apple’s iTunes. And having several copies in several places is a pain. In the same way, I have photos on my hard drive, on Flickr, and on Facebook all at once. There’s no place for all my stuff (to quote George Carlin a bit.)

There’s another twist here, though. Today, I have to synch, which means knowing what I want to listen to ahead of time. I have a few pictures on my Blackberry. But we’re at what I think is an inflection point in content. Two key things have happened. First, mobile Internet access is (mostly) ubiquitous, and will be in many cities shortly. And second, the sustained data rates of Internet connections exceeds the data rate of the media.

What this means is I can stand in San Francisco, fire up my iPhone’s Wifi interface, and listen to music. And with a 128 Kbps song, as long as I have more than 128 Kbps, I can just stream it. For various media — some of which demand not just raw bandwidth but also jitter and packet loss levels — there’s a precipitous drop in value of synch.

In other words: Suddenly, I want all my stuff, now.

Webot is Flex-based. The desktop agent’s pretty lightweight and straightforward to install. I’ve run it from a variety of locations across the continent, both residential and corporate, and it doesn’t seem to have problems. Here’s what the Web UI looks like…

Anyway, if Skype breaks the AT&T monopoly then companies that build other apps for the iPhone are going to change those economics. Om Malik at GigaOm met with the founders and has a decent writeup on the subject. Of course, with Columbia Records telling Valleywag that the music industry is a service, and a growing list of hacks and apps for the iPhone platform, the iPhone’s appeal may be finally unlocking mobile devices in the US with sheer coolness.