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.

Sony’s announcement today that it’s throwing open the doors of its e-book store and reading devices to the ePub standard is certainly good news for consumers. ePub — and open standard developed by the International Digital Publishing Form — is already supported by a growing number of major publishers and a growing number of reading devices. With Sony on board, consumers will have greater flexibility over how they buy and read e-books.

The move is also clearly a bid by Sony to establish itself as the No. 2 in the e-book market behind Amazon’s Kindle before the Barnes & Noble/Plastic Logic alliance comes fully online next year. But the big winner in today’s announcement is Adobe Systems.

While Sony is embracing the open, XML-based ePub standard for delivery and viewing of e-books, those e-books will still come wrapped in copy protection. As part of today’s announcement, Sony said it will scrap its own, proprietary e-book DRM in favor of the more widely supported Adobe Content Server 4 (although the ePub standards has no native DRM the ePub Container format, which bundles e-book content with metadata and other elements for delivery over the Internet, can support third-party DRMs, including Adobe’s).

As Adobe’s GM of ePublishing, Bill McCoy, pointed out in a blog post yesterday, the Sony announcement brings the number of e-book reading devices that are compatible with Adobe’s Server platform to 17, marketed by nine different vendors. Whether by accident or design, the Adobe server system is emerging as the leading e-book publishing and DRM platform after Amazon’s Kindle platform.

Why is that important? As I point out in a report on the e-book market released earlier this month by GigaOM Pro (subscription required), Amazon’s e-book ambitions go beyond simply selling a lot of Kindle devices. Taking a page from Apple’s iTunes playbook, its goal is to establish Kindle as the dominant e-book publishing and distribution platform. And as Apple has amply demonstrated, when you control the platform, you control the value chain, which means you reap a disproportionate share of the value that’s exchanged.

And the best way to maintain control over a platform — again, per Apple — is through the use of proprietary DRM. Like Amazon’s Kindle DRM, the copy protection at the heart of the Content Server platform is proprietary, in that Adobe owns it. Unlike Amazon, however, Adobe’s standard is openly licensable by others. While that still leave Adobe in an enviable position — able to collect licensing fees from both ends of the value chain — it’s clearly a more friendly environment for publishers and consumers than Amazon’s walled-garden approach — and may be publishers’ best bet to avoid getting trapped by Amazon the way the record companies were by Apple.

Interestingly, the odd man out here could be Barnes & Noble. The B&N eBookstore supports the ePub standard, but for now it’s sticking with its own DRM system rather than adopting the Adobe platform. Barnes & Noble was undoubtedly hoping to position itself as the industry’s best alternative to Amazon, but it may just have been outmaneuvered by Sony/Adobe. Two contending platforms is good for business. Three just might be a crowd.

Paul Sweeting writes The Media Wonk blog and is author of an upcoming report on the e-book market for GigaOM Pro.

While Xoopit’s flagship email product is being touted as the reason why Yahoo agreed to buy the company, I think the underlying technology used by Xoopit is far more interesting. Xoopit has even exposed this infrastructure technology as an on-demand service, which it’s dubbed CloudQuery, with the tagline “Search as a Service.” But I suspect that, once the acquisition closes, CloudQuery will get buried deep in the bowels of Yahoo.

Essentially Xoopit’s CloudQuery allows you to search-enable any application. It combines the functionality of full text search with more structured database-like queries, which have the advantage of being aware of the underlying data structure of the application and thus provide more accurate search results and in near real-time. It is very similar to the open-source project Apache Solr; both are based on the popular Apache Lucene.

Suppose I start a dating site that I want to equip with a sophisticated search engine. I have certain well-defined data fields, which I want to be searched as such (and not with a Google-style free text search); in other words I want people to be able to search for “gender is female,” “age is greater than 30 and less than 40″ and “location is less than 5 miles from Zip 94107.” But I also want to enable a full text search that says “long walks on the beach.” With the Xoopit CloudQuery service I can quickly index my application and enable these sophisticated search capabilities, something I can’t do with Google ( s goog) Custom Search, for example.

Because of their near-instant indexing capabilities, technologies such as CloudQuery and Solr will be key in implementing the notion of the real-time web that has been popularized by services such as Twitter. Not only will I be able to perform the above query, but I will be able to set a real-time alert for it. To see a very simple but interesting use of this kind of technology, check out Dave Rosenberg’s “A-Z List of Underrated Bands,” which he created using Twitter Search. If you click on the link you’ll see that the search query at the top says: “underrated bands” from:daveofdoom. This query essentially says “find all tweets that contain the words ‘underrated bands’ posted by the user ‘daveofdoom’.” if you were to leave that page open while Dave was adding to the list, you would have seen it updated on-the-fly — hence, the real-time web.

While Twitter has developed its own solution with significant development resources, Xoopit’s CloudQuery enables any application owner to very easily index and search-enable their application using its hosted cloud service and APIs. In addition to CloudQuery and Solr, other projects that are attempting to provide similar capabilities include the Ferret project for Ruby apps and Sphinx Search. As another indication of the level of interest in this area, Lucid Imagination, the company behind Solr (and Lucene support provider) recently received more than $6 million in funding from Granite Ventures, Walden International and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture fund. But Xoopit remains the only player that has implemented this type of technology as a cloud service.

Yet it appears Yahoo is acquiring Xoopit as part of its strategy of focusing on a handful of core apps — among them email — and turn its email application into a platform, around which it hopes developers will create an ecosystem of complementary apps and plug-ins, utilizing the APIs that Yahoo has published.

But as happens so often in this business, a lost opportunity for one company could prove to be a new opportunity for another.

Geva Perry, who writes the Thinking Out Cloud blog, is an adviser to startups and enterprises on cloud computing strategy and marketing. Follow him on Twitter: @gevaperry.

For both providers and customers of cloud technology, these are exciting times, and yet, in the midst of all of the energy and confusion that the cloud inspires, I can’t help but think that we’ve been here before. I see remarkable similarities between today’s adoption cycle of cloud technologies and the adoption of the Internet as a useful and essential tool.

Fifteen years ago, a similar industry conversation unfolded around how the World Wide Web could transform business — and really, society as a whole — as we then knew it. As commercialization of the web was getting under way, the idea that a new paradigm could really change the way technology was used and information was managed was met with both curiosity and skepticism. Much of the discussion centered around all the perceived barriers to widespread adoption of web technology, such as security, enterprise IT integration and technology lock-in vs. open standards.

Those of us who were a part of the technology industry back then as either vendors or customers can recall the volume and fervor that marked such debates. Industry analysts — along with much of the mainstream press — continued for quite some time to promote those aforementioned barriers as reasons why the transition to web- or distributed computing-based architectures would or could not be fulfilled. By the end of 1995, however, customers and vendors alike had begun to embrace the ideas and technologies of the web, fueling perhaps the largest economic expansion the technology business has ever seen, one that continues today.

Over the last two years, technology developers, businesses, industry analysts, press and vendors have begun to discuss the transition to cloud technologies. Just like in the early days of the commercialization of the Internet, both the benefits and barriers to such a transition are being hotly debated. Similarly, we now stand at a tipping point at which mainstream enterprises are seeing the value and vendors are offering services that deliver measurable business value, integrate into existing IT environments easily and address the common concerns around privacy, security, integrity, performance and availability. Widespread adoption, in other words, is already underway.

Granted, the industry doesn’t have all the solutions yet. But the solutions we do have and the valuable benefits they can provide to the enterprise IT buyer today are simply too compelling to ignore. With history as our guide those businesses that focus and commit on solving their challenges via these new services stand to reap the greatest financial, operational and competitive benefits of this technology transition.

It’s encouraging to see so many technology luminaries participating in healthy exchanges as the industry navigates this new era. My hope is that the conversation turns quickly from a discussion of “if” cloud technologies like storage and compute will become the norm for enterprises to one of “when” — and more interestingly, “how” the dramatic potential of the cloud can best be fulfilled. Indeed, another era of technology based innovation, adoption and economic prosperity has already started –- and it may just turn out to be even more compelling than the last one.

Jeff Treuhaft is the CEO and co-founder of Zetta Inc., a leading provider of enterprise cloud storage solutions.

NBC Universal General Counsel Rick Cotton, speaking at the Digital Media Conference in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, brushed off concerns that the deal between Comcast and Time Warner to test the feasibility of TV Everywhere was a first step toward bringing TV on the Internet under the control of Big Media.

“I know there’s been some static in the system that says this will somehow limit access to content online, but this is about increasing access,” Cotton said. “These are subscription networks now so it’s not really a big surprise that they would be subscription networks online as well.” He also shrugged off fears that the collaboration between programmers like Time Warner and ISPs like Comcast represented some sort of unholy cabal worthy of antitrust scrutiny from the government.

“They shouldn’t have called it TV Everywhere because what we’re really talking about is cable TV everywhere,” Cotton told me after his panel. “The idea is you would go to Fancast, or to Hulu, and there would be free content, just as there is now, and there would be subscription content, which you could access if you’re a subscriber.” It’s just like cable TV, he said. “There’s free, over-the-air content, but there’s also subscription content you can get by subscribing to cable.” The deals between subscription network owners and web video portals, he suggested, would be no different from the perfectly legal deals that currently exist between the networks and cable MSOs.

Maybe, but that’s only the simplest use case being discussed. What happens when we get to Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes’ nirvana where any multichannel video subscriber — whether to cable, satellite or telco TV — can access any of the content they subscribe to from anywhere on the web, whether directly through an ISP, through a web portal like Hulu or on mobile platforms? Apart from the sheer complexity of such a system, making it work will require a degree of information-sharing among nominal competitors that practically begs for antitrust scrutiny.

Let’s say I want to catch up with a missed episode of “In Treatment” by watching it online. I go to a web portal — we’ll call it YooHoo — and find the episode. Since I pay for HBO through my Comcast cable subscription I ought to be able to access the episode, presumably by typing in a password or some other authentication method. For that to work, however, YooHoo has to know something about my relationship with Comcast. Maybe Comcast owns YooHoo, in which case, no problem. But what if some other media company owns it? It now has access to information about my Comcast subscription.

Now let’s say I leave the house and want to access the same episode on my handheld device using Verizon Wireless’ V-Cast service. Now Verizon has to know something about my relationship, either with Comcast or with YooHoo — or both. Apart from whether that’s something Comcast would want to do — Verizon has recently begun soliciting me with offers for FiOS, after all — what we’re really talking about is multiple competing service providers sharing information with each other (or with the same third party) about prices, payments, customer service and behavior and all sorts of other data.

Such a system would just be ripe for abuse, even if intentions were pure going in. And it would only get worse as the number of ways to access the content increased. Of course, you could always break up the vertical monopolies among programmers, distributors and service providers and the problem would be solved, but somehow I don’t think that’s what Bewkes and Cotton are talking about.

Paul Sweeting is the author of The Media Wonk blog. He’s covered digital media and policy issues for over a decade.

Long plagued by legal challenges from major record labels, bankrupt MP3 search engine SeeqPod has been on the brink of extinction for months. But CEO Kasian Franks recently told Wired.com that SeeqPod was in final acquisition talks with a major media company, and that its savior would be able to confer legitimacy on the company by negotiating agreements with the labels that he himself could not. Now, the company appears to be tipping its hand, suggesting that Microsoft is the buyer.

SeeqPod’s home page, which has been down more often than not over the past few weeks, now features a pair of links suggesting that the service is cocooned for rebirth. One of the links points to search.microsoft.com -– not necessarily something I’d free-associate with metamorphosis. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant fits Franks’ description of a potential suitor, but was not among the three he named in the Wired interview — Apple, Google and Live Nation. I’ve left a message with SeeqPod seeking comment, and will update as I gather more information.

Based in Emeryville, Calif., 4-year-old SeeqPod has so far raised at least $5 million from founders and investors. Its search engine, derived from technology initially developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, allowed users to find songs wherever they were lying around on the web, then listen to streams and create playlists. But the startup has run afoul of major record labels, and was sued by both Warner Music Group and EMI Music.

Congratulations are in order this morning to Matt Marshall and his team over at VentureBeat. Matt has agreed to take the reins of the technology launchpad conference DEMO, replacing Chris Shipley after a very successful 13-year run. VentureBeat and DEMO parent company IDG will co-produce the spring and fall sessions of DEMO, after which Matt will step in as executive producer. “We agreed there is so much good about DEMO that we want to protect,” he wrote in his blog posting about the talks with Chris and IDG, “but that VentureBeat could also bring some fresh eyes to the event, help evolve it to adjust to changing times, and experiment with formats to improve it where possible.” We can’t wait — congratulations, Matt!

As Om has noted, most recently in relation to the acquisition of jkOnTheRun, our little company gets bigger by the day. Today I am thrilled to announce the very latest addition to our family: Celeste LeCompte.

Celeste joins us as Special Projects Editor. She will not only help with the day-to-day editing of stories, but will oversee our Briefings collection and the editorial side of our conferences and events, such as Mobilize and NewTeeVee Live. A cleantech expert whose last gig was as managing editor of Sustainable Industries, she will also contribute stories to Earth2Tech.

Please join me in giving Celeste a warm welcome. If you’d like to get in touch with her directly, she can be reached via email by writing Celeste at gigaom dot com.

Welcome, Celeste!

Although we at GigaOM are well aware that we’re part of the next generation of media, much of what we do and how we do it is governed by some of the most basic rules of traditional journalism, a profession whose ethics and mission we hold very dear to our hearts. So we were especially honored to learn that when presented with 10 of the top technology blogs on the web, tech reporters ranked GigaOM as the most credible one.

PR firm Brodeur, a division of Ominicom, teamed up with Marketwire to find out how beat reporters viewed the influence of social media on traditional news delivery; the survey also asked the reporters to rank blogs and other social media sites. From the survey:

Tech reporters ranked Engadget, Gizmodo, and Boing Boing as by far the most popular among the top 10 tested. But when it comes to credibility of content, journalists rated Arstechnica and GigaOm, along with Engadget, the top three sites. GigaOm scored the highest with 45% saying its content was “very credible.”

We have you to thank for this. Our community hold us to an incredibly high standard; if we’re doing something wrong, you are the first ones to tell us. And it is this evolution of media to which we are most dedicated — the ability to continue the conversation with those whose opinions matter to us the most: our readers.

Of course, we are always looking for good writers. If you’re interested in contributing to the site, drop me a line at carolyn at gigaom dot com.

LaunchBox Digital, an early-stage investment firm founded by three tech industry veterans and with an initial focus on web and mobile businesses, is due to be unveiled Thursday, we’ve learned. The Washington, D.C.-based company will provide between six and 10 entrepreneurs seed investment and help in incorporation through an intensive, 12-week program, during which time they’ll be able to draw on the advice and experiences of the firm’s founders and advisors as they develop a prototype or demo and craft their business plans.

At the end of the program, known as LaunchBox08, the entrepreneurs will be given an opportunity to present their businesses to VCs and other investors, strategic partners and others.

The founders of LaunchBox Digital are Julius Genachowski, formerly chief of business ops at IAC/InterActive (IACI); Sean Greene, founder and ex-CEO of The Away Network; and John McKinley, who served as president of digital services and CTO of AOL (TWX).

The company will begin accepting applications for LaunchBox08 immediately. LaunchBox Digital will also accept proposals from early-stage business for immediate seed or angel investment.

Concerns over the use of cell phones while driving used to be confined to talking on them, prompting numerous states and even countries around the world to ban the use of the device while driving unless used in conjunction with a hands-free accessory. From an occupied hands perspective, however, texting is clearly a bigger danger, and many of the laws have been amended to include or simply stress a ban on that activity as well.

This video from Nuance Communications (NUAN) features a send-up of “The Amazing Race” to show off its voice-prompted texting product:

What about you? Do u txt whl drvng?

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• Earth2Tech: Google’s going for pedal power.
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• NewTeeVee: DEMOfall 2007 kicks off tonight — a roundup of the news so far.

Found/Read: 5 Lessons from CEO Diane Greene’s long, slow slog with VMWare

Web Worker Daily: Pump up you IM power

NewTeeVee: Halo 3 has been become the latest online leak

Earth2Tech: Intel fires its latest salvo with the power efficiency-focused Nehalem

NewTeeVee: Joost may be sexy, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be seeing legal P2P in this fall’s TV lineup.

Web Worker Daily: Google has added presentations to its docs app — a first look.

Found/Read: Ways to delegate more effectively, from Marshall Goldsmith via Harvard.

Earth2Tech: Taking the trash out…of the landfill.

NewTeeVee: Not a geek, but just an Average Joe who wants to watch TV online? Skip BitTorrent and all the others and go to SideReel.

Found/Read: When it comes to business plans, sometimes the best advice is to tear it up and start over.

Earth2Tech: More than anything else right now, solar thermal startups need loan guarantees, according to Ausra co-founder David Mills.

Web Worker Daily: Join the outsourcing ranks — not as an employer, but an employee.

Future of Software: Making Facebook Platform Apps Scale on the Cheap

Found/Read: Why one software developer went to South America to incubate his startup.

Web Worker Daily: Time-saving tips for working in Microsoft Word.

NewTeeVee: Dailymotion raises $34 million in a second venture capital round — less than two weeks after competitor Metacafe secured $30 million.