Whilst I’m neatly balanced between flu and pharmaceuticals and enjoying some fading lucidity, one parting thought for today.
I can’t name my accomplice, ‘cos it busts his girl’s privacy without her permission. But he tells me that his tweenage daughter has taken to a new form of social communications media (reproduced with permission, though):
one little strange thing my daughter and her friends do with skype is they put their best friend’s picture instead of their own in the profile, strange huh? It seems that part of their identity is their best friend and they advertise who this is to each other.
Wowee. Cool! The users will always re-invent your products in unexpected ways.
Funnily enough, some telcos did great with “family plan” products. Some even managed minor product innovation as well as billing changes. But none seem to have produced group-centric products. You don’t have to be a business genius to see that the social group dominates the life of tweens and teens. Admittedly, it’s a back-office nightmare with current systems to build such products, because identity management isn’t up to scratch. (Lots of dirty telco secrets, but it takes good wine to extract them.) Then again, that isn’t a problem for those aiming to win the whole schebang from scratch.
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I once had an idea for self-build hierarchies for prepaid customers, where you could request someone to join your hierarchy and they could accept or reject (much like IM authorisation).
I stood there telling the mobile operators how great this would be because they would get to know about the relationships between their anonymous prepaid subs...this was 1999. You can imagine how well it went over!
Interesting re. girls advertising their best friends with Skype icons. Another interesting (perhaps unintended) use of Skype: I know of a pair of long distance lovers who use Skype to just listen to each other's ambient environments - mostly not even talking, but leaving the connection on and being able to hear the sounds of getting through the day - cooking, washing, movements through the house. I tried it with a dear friend I was missing once and found it strange, but also somehow comforting to have that window into her life.
Posted by: at March 28, 2006 10:30 PM