Telecom and Social Networks
Yesterday, Tim O’Reilly of O’Rielly Media – the company behind the Etel (Emerging Telephony) conference – posted an interesting commentary on Social Networks. His thoughts, were in turn, provoked by a blog post from Jon Udell dealing with challenges faced by new Social Networks in achieving critical mass.
The article claims that the large number of new social networks that are being started is creating a great deal of noise, and making it progressively more difficult for new networks to attract sufficient attention. Both articles go on to suggest that the internet is ideally suited to address some elements of this problem – in the sense that it was created to be the ‘network of networks’. Tim however, goes further, stating that; what is needed is for communication vendors to …
“social-network enable our real social network apps: our IM, our email, our phone”
Yes! The network exists; has global reach and already has the key elements necessary to support Social Networking experiences. By instrumenting our communication networks, as Tim so elequently states in his post;
“the social network becomes visible (and under the control of the user)”
This network view, however, requires that vendors and Service Providers alike, begin thinking in terms of true Open System architectures and the benefits that these strategies can bring. This would represent a very disruptive change, and for that reason alone, it is not likely to come from one of the established players today.
