Finally, skype opened their platform for myspace

Skype announced partnership with MySpace to integrate their internet telephony software with myspace im. This is an awesome news. This is the first time skype has opened up their platform for a third-party company. Rightly chosen, MySpace is one of the biggest social networking sites in the world. With over 110 million MySpace users and 220 million skype users, Mind blowing. Scheduled to roll out in November, the new version of MySpaceIM, will enable users to place and receive VoIP calls through Skype’s network, either to other MySpaceIM users or Skype’s own users. In addition, skype users shall be able to IM or call MySpaceIM users. Standard pc-to-pc calls shall be free, but users need to pay for premium options like calling a landline or mobile from the PC.

I always believed social networking needed some kind of voice communication platform that can be used by the community for private and group communication. There are quite a few widgets that support this functionality. However, these widgets have their own limitations when it comes to full access of social media data inside a social networking community. We are seeing the Telco walled garden model being repeated in Social networking community. Even facebook’s tall claim of open platform doesn’t really seem to be true. From a future standpoint, holding social graph data in the walled garden is not going to be a winning model. Skype partnership with myspace should give skype platform access to all the social media data, which gives the client more flexibility in terms of supporting niche features.

Just couple of days back, I was reading rich tehrani’s great Article about how to monetize skype’s success. One of the suggestions was, enhancing skypes social networking capabilities. Well he was right on the money; Skype and MySpace announced their partnership. What a coincidence.
It’s very good news for Skype and MySpace, but maybe a bad news for other voip widgets startups like Jaxtr, Jangl , Jajah etc who have been exclusively targeting social networking platforms. Apparently, it looks like skype is planning to integrate with other social networking platforms. So, in future we can expect more Skype deals with other social networking companies. Hope this deal brings some smile back to voip in web 2.0 space.