| Here is what Microsoft should do with Skype and it's 140Million-member social network: Beat Facebook. Turn Skype into Diaspora. (Specifically, take Skype's persistent chatrooms into the next dimension) Integrate Skype with Windows Photo Album, Movie Maker, Spaces, blah blah. Mayke Skype a local application for managing your personal content -- photos, videos, thoughts, whatever. Leverage Skype's encrypted P2P infrastructure to make truly privacy-protected social networking. Automatically send status updates and comments and stuff to a user's friends over the Skype network. Make social network truly social, and not dependent on a central server. Monetizations:
* ads in the the client software
* for-pay special privacy settings for business/paranoid:
An Enterprise version that runs inside a private (corporate) network, with centralized IT authority.
* For-pay broadcast-type features for self-promoters.
* For-pay "professional" and other custom front-end for more specifically-structure communities than Facebook's free for all pseudo-"Friend" relationship. Let users import/export their data between Skype and other network and blog systems. Skype could displace Facebook, making social networking better for everyone, and rain money on MS. |
If only a company like that had bought Skype...