I just wrapped up a day and a half at AT&T’s business analyst event here in New Jersey. I “live tweeted” the event to some extent – see here for a broad view of some of the themes discussed there.

But one of the things I was most encouraged about and interested in was some of AT&T’s activities that I would classify as fitting within my social telco definition. As AT&T expands into the cloud computing space, it will be launching storage-as-a-service and compute-as-a-service offerings in the coming months. But it will also be developing something it calls “platform-as-a-service”. It’s not the best name, because it’s not all that descriptive – as a colleague said, it reminds you of Salesforce’s efforts to expand from its core CRM-as-a-service proposition to something broader. But the concept is good, even if the nomenclature isn’t.

What platform-as-a-service would do is expose both computing and network functionality through APIs to third parties. This would allow those third parties – whether ISVs, enterprises developing their own apps or even web players – to create apps that would be able to issue commands to AT&T’s compute and network infrastructure. The focus in AT&T’s presentation on the topic was on the compute-type commands, but the plan is very much to roll out more or less the full set of Parlay X commands over time in handfuls at intervals over the next year or two, starting later this year. 

One of the things I found interesting about this is how AT&T is approaching some of the greatest challenges associated with exposing this kind of functionality to third parties: namely, verifying identity and providing security in order to protect privacy. AT&T is piggybacking off its efforts on the mobile application side here, benefiting from its DevCentral developer community and the processes and interfaces developed to facilitate the development of mobile apps by partners. This is probably a good model for other telcos with well developed mobile developer ecosystems since a lot of the legwork has already been done. 

I’m going to be requesting a more detailed briefing on these activities, and especially on the linkages between consumer and business efforts in this area, and will likely put something together for publication subsequently. But this certainly looks like an interesting and promising initiative from AT&T in this area, and one that other telcos can learn from.

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A small sample size, to be sure, but I’ve had three pieces of feedback from colleagues on my social telco comment. The first two were brief but confirmed the comments I made about teenagers and their communication habits:

this is my son…”Why would I get a landline from anyone?”…also reminds of PacBell circa 1995…..why would we offer and fund an internet service when all the services on it are free?

My teenagers do not answer the fixed phone even if it is ringing and they are standing right next to it – they know that it is never for them. I bet they don’t know who our provider is. They do use the broadband, and they do know who we get that from, because they compare speed and contract details with their mates.

That’s an interesting point about broadband. I know of other examples where this is the case, and teenagers are aware of and talk about the broadband provider used at home. I’d guess this is particularly prevalent among avid gamers but also to some extent among consumers of significant amounts of online video.

The third comment is interesting because it indicates the trends are similar even once the transition is made to college:

I have two teenagers.. one in college, one in high school.. Both have had cell phones for several years now. Both text much more than they talk, and both rely on Facebook quite extensively as a sort of ‘virtual mall’ i.e. place to hang out and chat with friends, check out members of the opposite sex, flirt, etc… What I find most surprising and interesting about my kids use of communications media is that they very rarely use email. It is seen as something of their parents generation. Something the college or high school uses for tuition notices or homework, etc. Whereas I would use an email distribution list to announce an event being hosted by a club I belong to, my daughter would create a group in Facebook and invite friends to it (and by extension, friends of friends, etc.) To her this is the normal mode of operation.

So my personal experience resonates strongly with your contention that wireline telcos had better find a way to participate and engage with the younger generation on their terms, or risk being relegated to the role of a broadband access utility. Similarly, MNOs should be working like dogs to make social networking easily and cheaply accessible from handheld devices. Google and Nokia probably ‘get’ this in a way the operators haven’t, so far.

I agree with all of this. And I think the point about email is not to be underestimated. Bizarre as it seems to those of us who are members of Generation X and experienced email for the first time as older teenagers or young adults, it’s already become passé to Generation Y. One to one communication has largely been replaced with many to many communication, and that trend will only continue.

By way of explanation, through the Church I belong to and through my wife’s large family I have frequent access to teenagers and get to observe them and their communication habits at close quarters (and many of them are among my “friends” on Facebook). Some of my observations in this blog are therefore based on that anecdotal evidence as well as on more statistically significant published sources such as surveys.

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I wrote this comment this week for publication in Ovum’s Straight Talk Daily publication, and so I’m linking to it in two spots where it can be found in the public domain online:

Ovum’s site – this tends to disappear after a period of time

Telecom Asia site – hopefully, this will be up longer.

It encapsulates (with a 700 word limit – more leeway than Twitter but still not enough to really develop an idea) some of the things I’ve been thinking about recently, and really the key themes of this blog going forward. I’ve previously covered telcos and social networking / web 2.0 separately but more and more I’ll be talking about how the two are coming together.

I’ll be expanding on some of the themes in the piece here in future. I’ve already posted on changing communication preferences previously here.

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