I’d love to see Skype follow Brian McConnell’s advice on @gigaom and add an open status updating mechanism. See my “Skype Will Never Beat Facebook from Jan09 so this isn’t the first time it has been discussed in the Skypeosphere. However, he has to go further and I believe Twitter is equally dangerous and may offer more for Skype to learn from.
A Social Skype adds Skeets to usurp tweets.
- I must be able to export my status updates. (eg RSS), thus have the option to broadcast beyond my buddylist. (Note: even if I decided to move my updates to Skype and then forward to twitter or facebook etc unless I have more discretionary control in a way that is more valuable only a % will do it.)
- I must also be possible to direct a status updates – must relate to groups / lists. Some lists may be public and others semi-private. When updates are available to some friends and not others by the simple action of updating them then I have a simple format for being more directive.
- Status updates must include a geo-location opportunity. In days any discussion of status updates without this feature will be pointless. Geo-Location changes everything. Whether desktop or mobile location data will matter. If Skype adds list like functionality above it would also give Skype another way to say who I want to release this GEO information to.
- The Biggie! Skype must improve the escalation to a call capability. Social networks have reputation associated with them. Contacts isn’t enough. I should be able to see public Skeets. Skype also doesn’t use a “Call Me” request (adds me as a contact instead). Skype should eliminate the “add as a contact” function and change that to a “call me” request. On acceptance it should ring the other party. Right now there is too much friction for going to calls outside one’s buddylist (most which contrary to phone logic only take calls from buddies). On Skype with a Skeet / Tweet type functionality that goes beyond the buddylist then you need a relatively friction free way to escalate those calls. You also need the reputation or other “filtering” to stop unwanted calls. Spam chat is already a big problem.
- This method also suggests that it should be possible to send @messages or their equivalent. Right now that is dependent on privacy settings. Yet if my @skeets are public then I am more likely to be legitimate than those I get currently along with 1000 others and have to block. So Skype needs to change the privacy capability to enable public chat betwee @skypers. A reputation system will also help that.
- This raises the issue of signals. Right now you get the signal when the Skyper logs back on. That’s why Skype is more broken that telephony. A call is often time specific and in fact many messages are too. Just like we like our twitter @messages to be timely (if you use it regularly) a better signaling system must exist for when I’m offline. Apple’s notification server is a good example of this. In fact if Skype solves that for the iPhone they may well be solving a much broader issue for all users.
- To make this more valuable I also have to have an API so I can manage these interactions from any client I want. Whether I manage it back to my desktop or some other service somewhere. The Twitterverse has proven that Skype’s locked in client development approach is not quick enough, and not appropriate for all people. We are no longer in a one-size fits all world. If Skype wants to win versus other social networks then it must give us more control than they do. The solution is to be both more open and more secure from my perspective as a user.
- So now I can get notifications from Skype and I can feed data into Twitter or otherwise I can respond to Skeets or Tweets on my own terms. The important thing is “notifications” on my mobile.
- Skype then has major advantages over Twitter. Eg a Skeet can escalate to a chat, or multichat or calls or conferences. With location… some chats are persistent… So now I may enter anyzone… as long as I’m in that zone and chat for example. Skype potentially does a better job of this quicker than Twitter can.
While I’m on Skype ranting and wishing they would really be innovative rather than turning out crappy window’s clients I also want these things…
- When I share my desktop I want to retain sharing my video link at the same time.
- I also want multi-party video. I see no technical reason for holding off on this – even if just to make it three way.Three way opens up an area of experimentation that most people have never experienced. Then let one person share another stream at the same time.
- Let me run my Skype client anywhere… on my own server etc. Let me interconnect it with SIP phones etc. Let me use it as my channel management tool.
- Reinforce that doing the above means that names rather than numbers matter. SO let me add a TwitterID and Facebook to my profile, let me decide via lists which profiles I want to expose. But as a culture stop thinking about the world as numbers for that is a blindspot that is abundantly clear. Make a world for me where you and anyone can call me by name! Make that part of your mantra!
BTW Skype and @niklas. I could Twitterize your client and create a mock-up in hours. I think that would be an awesome project. We’d also quickly take it way beyond what is outlined above. I also believe this would “SIMPLIFY” the current client and make it more accessible. As background since you have been out of the business see “Twitter and the Business Model 2009″ or “I am not a number! I am @stuarthenshall a Twittername. Oh and as Skype just exceeded 20m online my view isn’t that different to “Skype and 14m! – No big deal! from 2008.
The I don’t think I’m really prescient although I’ve been following and writing about Skype a long time. I once wrote: A Year Skyping and…. (Unbound Spiral) Sept 14th 2004: Oh dear… suggested to add Twitter like direction in 2004!
However Skype is in the real-time communications business, it’s an always-on company made possible by Skypers. Many Skypers would enable a Skype news feed as a tab in Skype. What may start of as a blog could become a very different community asset overtime.
From Brian McConnell of Gigaom:How Skype Can Quickly and Easily Become a Social Network (and Clean Facebook’s Clock)
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.
A true rant never really finishes does it. Why VoIP Innovation Died with Skype (Unbound Spiral) Oct 1, 2007. Somethings one will always feel deeply about. Skype helped change my world making it completely interconnected and enabling conversations I never could have had otherwise. That’s not the only reason to use it and yet the knowledge still pulls at one’s heart strings. Skype remains more useful and more personal to me on a daily basis than Facebook or Twitter because it provides the escalation to voice conversations and I don’t have to exit the network and jump onto another to have that experience or convenience.
