Tuesday, September 16, 2003

Tie Skype to social software and you have automagical experience Stuart Henshall and I were talking today via Skype, the P2P voice over IP (VoIP) application, and agreed that a Skype tag that allowed someone reading a blog entry, a Web page of any sort, or any document that supported calls to Web resources, to click a link to open a VoIP connection with the author would be a powerful foundation for a business model in social software. Imagine being able to talk to someone when your trackbacks show a new connection from their blog -- instant social connection, instant business connection. Technorati and Google APIs would become phone listings. Blog pages would be self-organizing phone books. Connections would proliferate, but of course there would be other issues to work out (that being the really great thing about technology: one begets another begats another like genealogical lists in the Bible). Tie expertise to follow-ups, so that you could ask a blogger a follow-up question or ping a lawyer for a bit of advice after reading their Web page; the key being that there could be a fee for real-time personal connections -- or not, as it is also easy to see how the recipient of the call (the author) could use the right query to unlock more information and, so, would not want or need to get paid. Stuart writes comprehensively about this. Here is a key sample: Thus blogging / knowledge assets would also have a Skype contact number capability and whether they could be reached now or if they are offline you could offer a notification service perhaps even using Skype that so’n so is now online. Potentially you could make this a Technorati call. You become the call forwarder thus brokering the intro. Ie this person has linked to your blog and is available to talk to you. Similarly when I send a trackback pin, should I have an option to ping Technorati that I'd be willing to talk to the pinged author? There's a lot that could be done here. I imagine Feedster too could start searching online Skype users and link back to retrieved postings. What I want right here at the end of a posting is a "Skype me" link. Now, the problem is Skype is proprietary, so what I expect to see is either Skype going open source or that an open source alternative will emerge. What, then, is Skype's business? Being the best aggregator of social links and providing a fee-based bridge to the switched telephone network. [RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing] 2:20:07 PM    Trackback []

Here is a demonstration of the callto: tags for Skype phone calls on your weblog. [John Robb's Weblog] 12:51:19 PM    Trackback []