Skype Is Your New MySpace Friend
MySpace will soon be offering its minions free voice chats via a new partnership with Skype. Skype will enhance the MySpace instant messaging service with new VoIP capabilities. MySpace IM with Skype, as the new service is called, will be announced today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
The Skype component of the new IM service will let MySpace users call friends in their social network as well as Skype users. Your MySpace profile will link up to your Skype account, and you’ll be able to make voice chat calls through both the MySpace IM client and the Skype client to members of either service. If your MySpace profile is private, you won’t receive calls from outside your friends list.
The new Skype services are expected to launch in November and will be available in all 20 countries where MySpace has localized sites.
From the Skype end you can now link you account to a MySpace profile (unless, for some reason, you’re a Skype user living in Japan, China or Taiwan, none of which will have access to the new feature).
As you would expect, MySpace members will be able to buy premium Skype services to augment the free chat. SkypeOut, which can make calls from Skype to outside lines, as well as SkypeIn, which receives calls from outside lines, will both be available to MySpace users for a price.
Web 2.0 champion Tim O’Reilly sees the deal as the beginning of a “convergence of social networking and communication applications.” In short, your social network is going to become your address book.
It sounds good, but if the convergence comes in the form of partnerships between social network companies and communications companies, it could be a long and painfully slow process. And in the mean time, call us boundlessly optimistic, but we think the open web will provide the same sort of features without the platform/service lock-in.
After all, the Skype-MySpace deal might be good news for MySpace users, but nearly the same features are already available to any Skype user with a combination of Skype’s Public Chat snippets and the “Skype Me” button, which can be embedded on any site. True, neither of those Skype features offer the tight integration planned for MySpace IM, but they also don’t require you to use MySpace.
Convergence between social networks and communications tools may be coming, but at the moment the tradeoffs are more significant than the features offered.
[via CNet]
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