MYSPACE, SKYPE TO PARTNER FOR VOICE FUNCTION ON IM CLIENT
MySpace and Skype are set to announce on Wednesday that the eBay-owned telephony client will be providing voice chat services for the News Corp.-owned social network's instant messaging client, MySpaceIM. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.
Context & Ripple Effects
Voice inside instant messaging is becoming table stakes: Yahoo added Skype-like voice calling to its own IM service back in December 2005, and eBay has been pushing further tie-ins for Skype across its properties since mid-2006. What changes with this deal is distribution — Skype's telephony moves out of its standalone client and into MySpaceIM, putting it in front of the largest social network's user base.
The timing matters for both parents. Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom said days before the announcement that the service keeps growing at a steady pace, yet eBay's purchase price remains contested — the co-founder himself called the valuation inflated. A marquee partner like News Corp.'s MySpace gives eBay something concrete to show for the acquisition. For MySpace, the deal lands one week before the launch of its developer Platform, signaling that the network intends to open up beyond first-party features.
First-order effects
- MySpaceIM users gain free Skype-powered voice chat inside their existing messaging client, no separate Skype download required, while Skype acquires a mass-market distribution channel it did not have to build itself.
Second-order effects
- Rival IM networks — Yahoo, AIM, Windows Live Messenger — face pressure to match embedded voice or pursue their own social-network integrations, turning voice from a differentiator into an expected feature.
- eBay gets a template for cross-pollination: having just launched profile pages for its marketplace users in early October, it can now point to social-voice integration as proof its acquisitions add capability across the portfolio.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, standalone communication apps migrate toward becoming embeddable infrastructure — the value shifting from owning the client to powering voice inside whatever interface users already inhabit, a direction MySpace's imminent developer Platform reinforces.
The trend: Telephony is being unbundled from dedicated VoIP clients and re-embedded as a feature of social networks and messaging platforms, with partnerships rather than product launches doing the distributing.