James Wanless’ Unique Perspective on the Social Revolution
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Full disclosure, James Wanless is president and COO of MoPR client Talkster, and he’s a friend. But bias aside, he still posted a very interesting piece today about the “revolution” coming in communications.
James points out that the current view of communications is based on silos. For example, most people maintain separate accounts for phone, email and instant messenging (and may have separate accounts for each of these for home and work). This siloed approach means that people maintain a distinct contact list for each service. Even though we can synch and import contacts, the systems are distinct.
This approach is about to be shattered by the needs and desires of a new generation of people who are literally being weened on social networks. James is not talking about Facebook and MySpace users (although they matter a great deal too). James is referring to people like my daughters, who years before they could write their name or had any phone etiquette were meeting their friends and making new ones on Club Penguin. Club Penguin is a social network for kids, and despite it’s video game-like appearance has many of the same attributes of the more grown-up social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.
James asserts that as these children become adults, their expectation of communications will change, forcing the communications platforms to likewise change. In the end what we will have is not a siloed series of communications services, but a singular platform that integrates everything we use and creates portability. Instead of using Outlook we’ll use Facebook. And Facebook will be on our mobile phone too. We’ll use Facebook (or MySpace or LinkedIn or Ning, etc.) as our conduit to communication.
Once that happens, instead of looking up a person, deciding whether to call, email or text, and then establishing the communication, we’ll simply open our friends list, click on a face and voila — we’re connected in the most convenient fashion for both parties. In this environment you have greater control on who and how you are contacted. Business contacts are able to reach you at certain times on certain devices whereas friends and family may have a different set of times and methods. You would no longer need to give out phone numbers, email addresses, etc (although you would probably still maintain them). Thus you would have a better ability to maintain your privacy while at the same time still be very public with your profile. And if you need to change any of this information, you simply update your profile and that information is updated for everyone, much like how Plaxo is building their service.
After walking the floor at CTIA with James and discussing this very subject, I think he is completely accurate. It’s an exciting development, and it’s surprising to me that the social networking Goliaths have not been more vocal about such a change. I am certain that the folks building Microsoft’s next version of Exchange are thinking about it.
One added benefit James didn’t discuss — this could spell an end to telemarketing! And for that reason alone, more resource should be devoted to making this change happen.
Oh yeah, and a sidebar note: I would be remiss in my role as a member of Talkster’s PR team if I didn’t point out that Talkster can already enable this revolution today with their communications platform.
Read James’ post “Giving Voice to the Social Revolution” at the Talkster Blog.
