Post date: May 14, 2011 9:25:37 PM
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.