{"id":38883,"date":"2009-11-09T18:09:20","date_gmt":"2009-11-09T23:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=78954"},"modified":"2009-11-09T18:09:20","modified_gmt":"2009-11-09T23:09:20","slug":"how-skype-can-quickly-and-easily-become-a-social-network-and-clean-facebook%e2%80%99s-clock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/38883","title":{"rendered":"How Skype Can Quickly and Easily Become a Social Network (and Clean Facebook\u2019s Clock)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='snap_preview'>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-43131\" title=\"skype_logo\" src=\"http:\/\/gigaom.files.wordpress.com\/2009\/03\/skype_logo.png?w=105&#038;h=47\" alt=\"skype_logo\" width=\"105\" height=\"47\" \/>As a longtime Skype user who never felt that the service fit with eBay, I was thrilled to hear that <a href=\"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/2009\/11\/06\/my-thoughts-on-skype-settlement-winners-losers-scorecard\/\">it&#8217;s being spun off.<\/a> And now I have some thoughts on how it can quickly and easily become an equally successful social network. <iframe src='http:\/\/digg.com\/api\/diggthis.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdigg.com%2Ftech_news%2FHow_Skype_Can_Quickly_and_Easily_Become_a_Social_Network' height='82' width='55' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' style='float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 5px; padding: 4px 0 2px 4px; background: #fff;'><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In some respects, Skype already is the world&#8217;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&#8217;t need to sell advertising, which means that it doesn&#8217;t need to infringe on users&#8217; privacy by turning their personal information into a salable commodity for advertisers &#8212; 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?<\/p>\n<p>Skype already has a great client for real-time communication: a social graph of people its users know and call. It&#8217;s available for every major platform, and given Skype&#8217;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\u2019s current status, media files, link feeds and so forth, and to obtain a real-time view of what\u2019s happening with other users, it could call around to folks in a user\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019re offline, the need for a centralized web-based infrastructure is greatly reduced.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2014 which makes it a smart business decision. Besides, I&#8217;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&#8217;s phone company &#8212; it could quickly and easily become the world&#8217;s social network, too.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/stats.wordpress.com\/b.gif?host=gigaom.com&#038;blog=1149864&#038;post=78954&#038;subd=gigaom&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1\" \/><\/div>\n<div class=\"feedflare\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?a=KDXPlhs0Igg:PvN_oEMucto:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?a=KDXPlhs0Igg:PvN_oEMucto:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?i=KDXPlhs0Igg:PvN_oEMucto:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?a=KDXPlhs0Igg:PvN_oEMucto:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?i=KDXPlhs0Igg:PvN_oEMucto:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?a=KDXPlhs0Igg:PvN_oEMucto:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?a=KDXPlhs0Igg:PvN_oEMucto:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?i=KDXPlhs0Igg:PvN_oEMucto:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/OmMalik\/~4\/KDXPlhs0Igg\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a longtime Skype user who never felt that the service fit with eBay, I was thrilled to hear that it&#8217;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&#8217;s largest social network, with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}