MySpace starts Skype call service
Social network website MySpace has joined forces with internet phone firm Skype to allow MySpace users to make calls to each other. — With the service, which starts from the end of November, the two firms say they are creating the world's largest online, voice-connected community.
Context & Ripple Effects
The BBC write-up lands a day after Webware first reported that Skype voice chat was coming to MySpace's instant messaging client, MySpaceIM — so this is the mainstream confirmation of a deal already circulating in tech press, picked up by the New York Times alongside Webware. It also arrives in a busy week for MySpace: Murdoch and DeWolfe used the Web 2.0 conference to announce the MySpace developer Platform (launching within days, after outreach to third-party developers) plus new privacy controls.
Voice is not new to instant messaging — Yahoo added a Skype-like calling feature to its own IM service back in December 2005 — so what MySpace is really buying is distribution: Skype brings the telephony layer, MySpace brings the audience, and the two are billing the result as the world's largest online voice-connected community. That claim is credible only because Skype's community has kept growing at a steady pace, as Zennstrom noted just days before the announcement.
First-order effects
- From the end of November, MySpace users can place calls to each other inside MySpaceIM, giving Skype a new front door to MySpace's member base without either firm building the other's technology.
Second-order effects
- Rival networks and IM providers — Yahoo among them, which shipped its own voice feature two years earlier — face pressure to match voice-on-the-social-graph rather than voice-in-the-client, while carriers see another channel routing minutes off traditional phone networks.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the social network profile becomes the default address book for internet calling, pushing VoIP from standalone software toward a feature embedded in whoever owns the user's identity and friend list.
The trend: Social networks are absorbing VoIP as a built-in feature, turning the friend list itself into the directory for internet telephony.