How Can Skype Become The Next Facebook

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I’m pretty sure that after reading the title of this post many of you are thinking: is this man crazy? Well, the heading is a little bit provocative, on purpose. Here is the story.

Yesterday I had a good chat on the phone with Stuart Henshall who asked me to use Skype. Honestly, I don’t usually use Skype for calling but rather for instant messaging. That being said, I found out that my headphones had a problem so while I was trying to look into it I paid attention to the software client more than usual, noticing something I usually don’t: 14.300.000 online users.

On October 2007 Skype crossed 10M online users for the first time and just a little bit more than one year later they added over 4M new online users. Another thing I noticed is that unlike Facebook, where I have roughly twice the number of contacts, on Skype the number of average online friends was  almost three times more.

All that above together with the new features introduced with Skype 2.8 for Mac made me wonder: can Skype ever become the next big thing in the field of “social networking” rather than “only” the most popular VoIP service ever? Let’s try to analyze how far Skype is from this “big picture”.

User Base

Users are not certainly a problem for Skype. With over 200M users (not active, but downloads), it’s not far from the huge 150M active users of Facebook. What Facebook is missing at this time is a powerful desktop client. Despite the world of consumer services is moving to the “cloud”, having an always on client on your PC has many benefits, such as being always available and experiencing a realtime interaction with your friends.

Status

The new Skype provides the ability to share your “mood” with your contacts, this becoming a sort of “feed” inside a new chat window or just a new “events” window. It’s far from what Facebook provides, but not that far away. Think of the ability to reply to moods and the FB behavior is easily reproduced.  Twitter integration is there already, too.

Sharing

With this version of Skype you can now collaborate more closely with your contacts thanks to the screen sharing capability. The ability to share photos and other stuff is not far away as well. Moreover, they should add the ability to let everyone view the contact list of their friends as well as their “activity”.

Profile

The profile of your friends you find on your Skype client is far from being a Facebook-like profile. First of all, it should be moved to the cloud. Moreover, it should be improved with all the relevant information in order to make it complete. That’s not certainly something difficult to get done and definitely a must have.

Applications

Again, third party developers can deal with that. Developers found out that an application/service integrated into Facebook can lead to completely different results rather than keeping it “isolated”. Skype Apps can be sort of plugins that users can use to interact with their contact list. What about a “Send a Coffee” or “Buy this Contact” option?

Messaging

While IM is ready, a “Skype Mail” would be the new Inbox. “Send Message” could be a new available option and as soon as a new message arrives, a new notification (maybe with a color different from the red used for other notifications) is shown.

The Wall

What about a blackboard shared with your contacts? Everyone can write and post something that others can see. Messages, Photos, videos and so on. Easy right? At your fingertip and always available from you desktop client.

This is nothing but a simple exercise to analyze whether  Skype has (or could easily have) the capabilities to become a widely used social network. The bug here is in the nature of Skype itself. As a peer to peer software, the concept of “in the cloud” is a little bit too far from Skype’s philosophy. Skype is essentially a multi-channel communication tool which works very well and that became a de-facto standard in the VoIP space, not certainly designed to act as a social network.

Is the future of Skype in the social networking space? Can all above be something which could help eBay to finally leverage this very powerful service, integrating an Adv engine too? I just noticed that others suggested this as a potential future development for Skype, too.

What do you think?

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Tagged as: EBay, facebook, Instant messaging, luca filigheddu, skype, Twitter, Voice over Internet Protocol