I warned you not to ignore Skype and its cousins in my first post. In my second, I explained that Skypers are experiencing today the "communications of the future" you promised generations ago. eBay's building on this to create a new intangibles market. As I pack for my trip to the Telecommunications Association of Michigan's Politech conference, let me tell you something else you may not know.

Skype and its cousins are social media. The calls they support may be transactional but are just as often threads in longer conversations, moments in a relationship timeline. So Skype builds in features that transcend the call and focus on the people and organizations in your life.

Users have buddy lists, the kind of speed dial that's alive and updated every minute, that keeps friends and colleagues and sales prospects close to each other and engaged. eBay says about a third of Skypers use it in the workplace. So project and process communication, small team coordination, collaboration even in the same office, are big applications. And it's not because Skype is free. It's because Skype builds social capital.

It helps people stay in touch through "presence." Before you call you want to know availability. And not just what someone's calendar says, you want to know what they're up to and where they are. Skype's simple moodies ("what I'm up to these days") and geopresence (My Skype should be saying I'm temporarily in Lansing but that my home time zone is Pacific) signal status.

Not all conversations are the same, obviously. So Skypers tune levels of intimacy for each call. They start with chat and if they need more can switch to voice or to video with one button. Like a good Leatherman multipurpose tool, people mix the blend of modes to the person, the topic, their sense of urgency, how well they know each other, how prepared they are at this moment for this level of intimacy (nothing like getting a video call when you are in your pajamas). 

After the calls, Skype keeps a history on my PC. All chats can be archived. All conversations are logged. I can see my own call patterns, who I talk with most. I can read what I promised in chat. With permission I can record calls and play them back when I'm less emotional, or for a coworker taking over an account. All of this makes me smarter about cultivating my relationships.

And all of this is so 2005. Watch for companies like iotum to run apps that help Skypers better manage my attention in the context of my many conversations and relationships. Watch for tools to analyze my social networks and map the social proximity of strangers, and friends of friends.

By the way, we haven't talked about lock-in. I know you're used to contractual terms that meet your every need. But real lock-in is in friends. What does it mean to Skype to have a human hub bring her rolodex into the network? To really exploit all these features to manage these precious connections? To leave the network, you have to take your friends, and they have to bring their friends, and so on. Switching costs become a matter of losing your buddy list, losing your conversational history, being less capable of sustaining those relationships. Social capital lock-in is one of the strongest barriers to switching you may ever experience.

So Skype puts all of these relationship tools in your customers' hands. And makes it simple. And fun.

What do you do as a Michigan phone company?

You have my phone bills, but when was the last time your robot called and suggested adding a frequent caller to my speed dial? Or letting me know that I haven't talked to someone this week that I usually talk with every Monday? You have the data. Do you expose it in anything but a billing context? 

You don't.

You force people to write down their contacts on paper. At a time when we have more contacts to administer, and information overload threatens our competence, let alone our sanity. In perilous economic times, who you know can be the difference between employment and bankruptcy. And as our population ages, those with friends live better, live longer, stay healthier. Yet POTS makes us keep precioius relationship data in our heads.

It's no wonder that people are bringing their friends into Skype's social network. Skype makes those relationships easier to care for, to attend, to garden.

As we measure our wealth in friendships and family, Skype makes us wealthier.

What do you do?