The Social Vampire: A Skype Red Design Challenge

When vampires tweet, follow, friend, and bite

Vampires vary more than humans in the degree of social connectedness and styles of social interaction. Skype for Vampires brings several features built on their social behavior.

Groups in Groups. Groups of vampires are called different things in different countries and subcultures. Depending on size and strength of ties, they have been called nests, clans, families, tribes. Skype "contact categories" now let you nest contact categories.

Unflattening Social Graphs. Skype contact groups are flat and democratic, unlike pecking orders among vampires. S4V lets you define hierarchy within contact groups. So you know who's the master.

Instant Cabal. A Skype preference automatically form groups by clan/bloodline affiliation. This can be a big time saver and better models real vampire-vampire relationships.

People Rank. S4V can sort your contacts using bloodline social proximity calculations. Social proximity shows how close you are to someone within a social graph, answering the questions "how many contacts do you share?" "how strong/active are those connections?" LinkedIn shows social proximity in a business context; Skype in the vampiric context. 

My Vampire(s). With a nod to twitter, Skype now lets non-vampires "follow" a vampire, and a vampire "claim" a non-vampire. Vampire affiliation and custody of non-vampires now shows up in search and search results, profiles, and automatic contact lists. Unclaimed humans can set their profile to the "BiteMe!" option in the My Species field.

Dating. Skype partnered with Lovebitten, a portal partnership for interspecies dating. The bitecurious can launch Skype chats and voice/video calls from the Lovebitten site. 

tags: lovebitten, bitecurious, biteme, skype, sociology, social, linkedin, twitter

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