Skype Journal

Skype’s long term identity will not be the new phone company. Skype is in the business of helping people manage their relationships. 

Dear Skype,

Please:

1. Join the Personal Data Ecosystem, a new umbrella organization and Identity Commons project, and participate in the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW)and Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) communities to advance person-centered identity and personal data concepts and technologies.
2. Experiment with helping your customers visualize and act on their non-Skype social updates in the Skype context. New contextual conversation triggers from outside of Skype should foster better relationships and more, longer, better conversations.
3. Expand SkypeWeb‘s presence service to also return mood messages where privacy settings permit.
4. Start talks with Ping.fm, Comcast Plaxo and others who can help you pipe Skype’s updates through the social web.
5. Test the effect of bringing workplace updates (from Yammer, SAP Friend Optimizer, Microsoft SharePoint, for example) into Skype on chat, conferencing and other calling behavior.

There’s an emerging role for Personal Data Stores (some people call it a personal data locker or data bank) that finds your information, collects it, and makes it easier for you to manage your relationships with the sites/services/apps/orgs that use or have custody of your data.

The Money Metaphor

One analog for the Personal Data Store is the bank where you store your money and keep it safe. They help you:

• get your money from other places
• put it to work passively with as they loan it out on your behalf and pay you interest
• pay others with your money through transfers, credit cards, EFTs, checking
• understand and manage your money’s states, flows, and allocations with metadata, reports, analysis and alerts
• comply with tax and other government authorities.

Continuing the bank analogy, vendors like Skype may take some of your money and hold it for you but that doesn’t make them a bank. Their core business isn’t helping you with your money. They just need to be responsible with your money and their own bank should work well with all of their customers’ banks.

The money metaphor for personal data works pretty well. People need institutions to act on our behalf, to be beholden to us for the security and utility of our personal information assets.

Back to Skype. 2008′s 28 “What Skype Means To Me” posts showed Skype bringing families closer together and helping people work remotely were more important than Skype’s disruption of the telecom industry. Skype’s true purpose, its long term identity, will not be the new phone company.

Skype at its core is in the business of helping me manage my relationships. Relationships are the accumulation of conversations and other things we do with each other. Those conversations and our social graph are awash in data. Yesterday I asked Skype to bring more of that data from other places into the Skype user experience.

There are two roles Skype-The-Company would play in this. The first is Social Peripheral Vision Provider. An SPPV provides a view into what is going on in the world through the lens of your interests and the people you know. You see this in desktop apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop and mobile apps like those from twitter, facebook, and foursquare. Consider this a role between social surveillance and social sousveillance.

The second role is as a Personal Data Store, helping Skype users control, manage, and employ their own profiles, updates, and the records of their conversations. None of the major internet or financial institutions does this well or at a broad consumer or business level. Google provides a measure of identity consolidation through the Google Profile. Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are substantial health PD projects.

Skype should be a PDS for your online data. Skype should help you:

• get your data from other places
• put it to work for you through de-personalized aggregation
• “Sign in with Skype”, authenticating my identity to other services
• field anonymized requests for contact (“someone at IBM would like to speak with someone like you at Skype Journal”)
• share your data with other services on request (“LinkedIn is checking for your latest contact information”)
• facet how you present yourself so your  Warcraft avatar is different from your LinkedIn profile photo
• contextualize your social graph’s activity (“these seven work contacts are in this meeting”, “your Tallinn contacts are leaving the office for the night”, “you haven’t checked in with your usual Monday morning people”)
• withdraw from other services, removing my data thoroughly

Skype could be the fourth party in Vendor Relations Management where its billion users (just a few more years) contract their data to companies that use it. As Joe Andrieu explains in his VRM and Personal Data Stores post:

Here are a few rights that users might want to be able to secure for their data, as well as some privileges they could provide to vendors:

1. Reciprocity – That vendors who access a particular type of data also agree to reciprocally provide updates to that data. For example, I might let Amazon access my media history records if they agree to update it with my past and future media purchases at Amazon.
2. Non-propagation – No further distribution of the data beyond the specific services authorized. No reselling to third-parties. No re-use by other divisions.
3. Non-persistence – No retention of the data beyond the session of the current transaction. For example, an emergency room physician can access my personal medical history while I’m under his or her care, but he or she can’t store that data on any internal systems.
4. Anonymous Persistence – Data can be retained, but only if it is suitably anonymized and disassociated from the individual user.
5. Editable Persistence – Data may be retained by the vendor, but it must be editable and deletable by the user.
6. Anonymized Analytic Rights – Vendor has the right to query the PD at a later point for business or operational analysis, as long as that analysis ensures anonymity after the fact.

Doc Searls added to the Cluetrain Manifesto‘s “Markets are Conversations” premise a tenth chapter: “Markets are Relationships.” eBay’s instincts were good when they bought Skype, a conversation enabler, to make eBay’s markets better. Skype’s cloud infrastructure could bring great power to their user’s side of business relationships and rich, trusted customer data to the vendors’ side. This could easily be the line of business that outpaces SkypeOut as a Skype’s top income source.