Luca posted a great blog today, about how Skype has a way to become a social networking powerhouse, a la Facebook. Interestingly, it was on Facebook that I saw Luca’s tweet about the new post:
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”.
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.
I don’t know if a desktop client is the best place to do social activity management. The browser is good for what’s it’s good for: rich browsing experiences. But I don’t want to change the form factor of the IM client just to accomodate a feed list or yet another messaging utility. Skype needs to stay in the same size and shape it has now: on the right side of my screen, occupying maybe 10% of my real estate.
Plus, the other thing that’s cool about Facebook is that nothing has to be immediate. The realtime nature of Skype conversations is precisely why I’d sometimes rather communicate on Facebook, or e-mail, etc. But please read Luca’s post, as it is a really cool idea that warrants deeper inspection.
