How Skype Can Quickly and Easily Become a Social Network (and Clean Facebook's Clock)
As a longtime Skype user who never felt that the service fit with eBay, I was thrilled to hear that it’s being spun off. And now I have some thoughts on how it can quickly and easily become an equally successful social network.
In some respects, Skype already is the world’s largest social network, with hundreds of millions of users. And as a peer-to-peer system that generates revenue primarily through outbound phone minutes, Skype doesn’t need to sell advertising, which means that it doesn’t need to infringe on users’ privacy by turning their personal information into a salable commodity for advertisers — in my mind the fundamental flaw of web-based social networks. In other words, Skype has in place a well-established foundation for a social networking system based on privacy and trust. So what might a social Skype look like?
Skype already has a great client for real-time communication: a social graph of people its users know and call. It’s available for every major platform, and given Skype’s popularity, there are a large number of people online at any one time. Each Skype client could serve a XML file with the user’s current status, media files, link feeds and so forth, and to obtain a real-time view of what’s happening with other users, it could call around to folks in a user’s Skype list to get the latest updates. Such a system could be highly decentralized, with most content served directly from one user to another, and largely self-hosted, which means the infrastructure costs would be much lower than a centrally run web service.
The user experience would be effortless. Users would simply see more social features appear in upgrades to the Skype client, with, for example, Twitter-like functionality to broadcast to friends and followers in one panel, a link/news-sharing interface in another. By moving this functionality into the client, apart from a caching mechanism to temporarily store content for users while they’re offline, the need for a centralized web-based infrastructure is greatly reduced.
Apart from poking Facebook in the eye, why should Skype become a social network? Because it would drive phone minutes and SMS messages between friends, which drives revenues — which makes it a smart business decision. Besides, I’ve never bought the idea that a dominant position in a market guarantees long-term success. Skype took out a whole slew of early VoIP networks to become the world’s phone company — it could quickly and easily become the world’s social network, too.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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I think this post will put more context around the Skype-as-a-Social-Network concept:
Post via Skype Journal: “Can they turn Skype Lite into a Skype Platform?”: http://bit.ly/2tV2QM
Slides on SlideShare: Skype-as-a-Platform: http://bit.ly/3mkClR
Skype can potentially be a lot more than a socnet. They can become rather more useful and interesting Skype-as-a-Platform.
Very insightful – you gave me one of those why didn’t I think of that moments.
Huh? I mean really – to blog about technologically they can do it is a fail ….If u really have a vision for them socially blog THAT
I agree, but there is one major flaw.
Skype requires a client.
As my online life as moved to the clouds, I no longer carry my notebook everywhere. Now, I use a PC at home, a thin client and work, and a smart phone in-between.
I am moving toward a client-less environment. I use Skype at home, but not on my thin client or phone. That doesn’t seem very social.
Another Major Flaw: Andreessen. His is on both boards and cannot compete with Facebook. Nice try.
@DaveM
A web browser is a client, one designed for documents. A browser is not the best client for real-time communication, lots of overhead, and it’s not what it was designed to do. So if Skype is embedded everywhere, and it already is widely installed, it’s fine to use Skype for communication, browser for document oriented tasks, for example. For comm apps, it’s better to use a client designed for that purpose, and there’s no reason a client like Skype can’t interact with browsers where they are a better interface.
Brian McC
Brian, interested to here your response to the above comment. This cannot happen because of Andreessen, right? He’s already pushing his luck with Ning.
Jenkins – Andreeson’s dual board seats shouldn’t present much of a problem. He can resign one, or get tossed from the other. Problem solved.
@jenkins I don’t know about the politics of the board, but it seems to me that Andresen has a duty to serve Skype’s shareholders so if they end up in competition, he’d need to bow out on those votes (or Skype could buy Ning, which is presumably looking for an exit at some point).
If it were me, I would start by adding some simple features, along the lines of what Twitter does, since Skype is well suited to a status update stream. This would not really be a direct threat to Ning, etc, although could be bad news for Twitter. If users really like it, then do more. If users don’t really respond, that’s good to know too. But a good place to start is a simple, lightweight service that has a practical communication purpose, then extend if the response is good.
My $0.02
Brian McC
Skype might be better off building a business network, not a social one. Facebook makes maybe $2/year from its users, but businesses will pay more than 50 times that, on a per-seat basis, for the telecoms/presence features that Skype already offers, plus some vPBX and other incremental features.
Of course, Skype could pursue both simultaneously, but if resources are an issue they’re better off going for the paying customers first.
@Paul
My guess is that such a service, if they build it, will naturally become a more business oriented network since so many people use Skype for work. I like the idea of providing users with simple, understandable tools, and then see what they do with them. I agree that there’s more money in business, so they’d be smart to look at how they can improve on services like conference calling, hosted PBX, higher end handsets, etc, but with 500M end users, they can make plenty of money whatever they do. Lucky position to be in.
It’s a lovely dream. I hope it happens. I’d love to help. :-)
With one caveat — no one’s clock gets cleaned. A Skype as a status-passing network based on open formats would be a very different thing from either Twitter or Facebook.
If you look at history, pundits always predict cleaned clocks, but in practice the clocks stay dirty. :-)
@Dave Winer
I agree. I think it’d be a much different animal, especially if the spec for the document format is open (e.g. microformats), then people could build all sorts of third party apps that write into the outgoing file, and can parse incoming files from peer users for information they can understand. Lots of possibilities.