One of the most transformative innovations on Twitter has been the invention of the @ symbol as an identifier of other users, which enabled conversations and subsequently a broader system of referring to other users of the service, whether in “retweeting”, recommending people to follow on #followfriday, or citing work or meetings with other users.

A couple of times recently, I’ve missed this functionality on other sites – Facebook in particular. I’ve wanted to refer to other users and have some way of easily identifying them with a simple symbol so that others would know who I meant and could find them, but it didn’t exist. I find that strangely limiting. And it’s got me to thinking about how useful it would be if we had a system of universally referring to other people online in whatever setting or service so that others who follow us could easily know exactly who we were talking about and identify them, follow them and so on.

There are several problems in actually doing this. Firstly, there’s the fact that Twitter is an inherently public medium (yes, you can “protect” your Tweets, but very few users actually make use of this function). Other sites are not as public – notably, Facebook, which has many more privacy controls by default. I could refer to someone’s Facebook page but since Facebook by default won’t let me see their profile it’s of limited use – I’m none the wiser by seeing the limited information Facebook will show me. Secondly, there’s the issue that many people aren’t on either Twitter, Facebook or any other social network. That’s one we can’t really overcome except through time (and a long time, at that). But most of the people you might want to refer to in this way will be members of one or other of these sites. Thirdly, even if someone is a member of one or other of these sites, it’s not always easy to find them if we only know them in real life, or through their blog, or as a celebrity. Lastly, there’s the issue of not being able to get the username you want and not being able to condense it to something short as an easy reference point – the @ system is great partly because it’s short and instantly recognizable even off Twitter.

These problems aside, the question then becomes how we can arrive at a universal system of unique identifiers for all the people we want to refer to. One solution is that Twitter eventually gains enough support to become the de facto standard – after all, the @ symbol gives us a very useful solution. But how long will Twitter last? And how useful will it be to refer to all people through their Twitter accounts? The limited information available there makes it a poor solution. So there’s a good chance that some separate identity would be more useful – allowing you to provide more information about yourself, linking to your various online profiles, and yet still providing a short URL or other unique identifier. There are a variety of services out there that do some of this – Retaggr, Plaxo, Google Profiles and so on. But none does all of these things well enough to meet the need altogether, although Google Profiles probably have the best shot through the sheer number of people who already have a Google account for Gmail. Microformats may also have a role to play here as the web continues to evolve. 

Hopefully someone out there is thinking about this and can create a solution that will meet all these needs and more! Perhaps they’ll even combine it with a SIP URI so that you could use the identifier to communicate with people too…

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A couple of experiences recently have reminded me of the importance of taking a fresh look at things from time to time – of taking oneself out of the everyday experience and attempting to look at situations from a different viewpoint in order to see the bigger picture and reorient oneself.

A personal experience (feel free to skip)

Our fridge broke down over the Memorial Day weekend – not the first time, but in fact the third in the last few months. Clearly time to replace it. But in the moment it was just stressful and frustrating: we have a tiny portable fridge that sits near my home office but it wasn’t anywhere near large enough to store all the food we had in our large fridge, and because the problem developed over a couple of days we had to throw out a lot of food and then deal with the inconvenience of living out of this small fridge in the basement while we figured out an alternative solution. To add to the frustration, it turns out that it’s very hard to buy a new fridge and get quick delivery – most stores will only do it in 15 days or so, which was clearly not going to work for us. So in a 3-hour window in our busy Memorial Day plans we had to hop in the car and go on a fruitless search for a new fridge – we didn’t find one, and so were in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

In the end, we bought a new fridge the following day and it was delivered on Wednesday. What little food we’d saved survived and was quickly rehoused, the freezer kept going well enough to preserve most of that food, and so by the end of Wednesday we were back to normal, more or less. At that point, perspective was easy to come by – things had not been so bad and we’d survived. Yes, it was frustrating, and yes, it was expensive – a hundred dollars’ worth of food and several hundred dollars’ of refrigerator later. But in the moment itself it was so hard to get away from the stress and frustration of what to do with all this food, where we were going to get a new refrigerator, whether we should settle for something less than ideal in the interests of getting the situation resolved quickly etc. In the moment, perspective was hard to come by, and we felt overwhelmed. After the fact, it was easier to see things in the proper light and feel less aggravated about the whole thing.

Perspective is hard to come by when we’re up to our elbows in rotten food

The long and the short of it is that when you’re up to your elbows in rotting food, it’s really hard to get a proper sense of perspective. And our working lives (and our personal lives too) are so often that way – we get tangled up in the minutiae of what we have to get done and all our time is taken up checking boxes and meeting deadlines, with very little time for something completely different. In some jobs, that might be OK – but in the vast majority of our lives, we all need to take a little time occasionally to reassess things, to get some fresh perspective, and to make sure we’re on the right track in a big picture sense, not just on deadline.

Google Wave is the perfect example

I’m writing this – at least in draft – on the evening of the day when Google Wave was announced to the world. Although it won’t launch officially for a few more months, it’s already generating huge buzz and promises to be a revolutionary communications platform. But it would never have come about without a couple of important examples of taking a fresh look. Firstly, Google has enshrined in its working practices the principle of 20% time – giving each employee an opportunity to work on something other than their day job for 1 day in 5. This pulls people out of the weeds and allows them to get a bit of perspective on bigger-picture things they could be working on.

But in addition, in this particular case, Google took a team of people who had come up with an idea – 5 years ago, in fact – and allowed them to go off and attempt to reinvent the communications experience. These were, in fact, not Google’s Gmail team or Google Talk team, but the people who created the product that eventually became Google Maps. They weren’t so entrenched in the minutiae of getting email to load faster or search to work better or putting more emoticon options in the IM product that they couldn’t see the whole thing needed an overhaul. They were physically separated from Google’s main campus in Mountain View by being located in Australia, of all places. And they came up with something truly revolutionary. I don’t think they could have done that without taking a step back and getting a fresh perspective – without looking through new eyes, in effect.

Establishing a process for gaining perspective regularly

Taking a fresh look and getting a fresh perspective is important to all of us and to our work and wellbeing. We need to step back from the coalface and see if we’re digging in the right place, or count our blessings and attempt to put our small troubles in appropriate perspective. It’s important for innovation, but it’s also important for our emotional health and our sense of satisfaction and enjoyment of what we do, to double check we’re on the right track or to make a course correction if we’re not. I haven’t yet developed a good discipline for doing this in either my work or personal life, but I’m going to be spending some time figuring out how to do it. I think it will come down to establishing a regular time to reflect and consider how things are going – to take inventory of both my work and personal life on a frequent basis. I’d love to hear any suggestions anyone else might have on how they’ve achieved this too.

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Verizon Wireless’’s PR agency was kind enough to send me an evaluation unit of its new MiFi device today, so I thought I’d spend a few minutes sharing some initial thoughts. For anyone not familiar with it, this is a pocket sized portable WiFi hotspot attached to Verizon’s EVDO network, with the intention of allowing your various devices – laptops, phones, gaming consoles etc. – to easily connect to the Internet in a variety of mobile situations.

The first thing I did was pull it out of the box to see what it looked like. I was actually slightly surprised by how small it was:

It’s less than a centimetre thick, so thinner than my iPhone and quite a bit thinner than my BlackBerry Bold. And the footprint is just a hair larger than a credit card. So it definitely lives up to the “pocket-sized” description and it’s extremely portable (I stuck it in my pocket with my iPhone later on as I went to run some errands and forgot it was there). 

The next step was getting the thing up and running, and there I ran into problems pretty quickly. My main personal computer is a MacBook and so that’s the machine I wanted to use to get it started. But although in theory I was supposed to just plug it in with the supplied USB cable and then follow automatic prompts, nothing happened when I plugged the thing in. No disk image, no simulated CD, nothing. So there was no way of getting the device to do anything useful at all whether automatically or otherwise. I tried unplugging it and plugging it in again several times but no dice. This was somewhat disappointing since the box clearly states that it’s Mac OSX compatible:

If the MacBook was my only device I’d have been out of luck. Fortunately, I have a desktop PC lurking nearby I could use, and so I tried that instead. To cut a long story short:

• the first time I plugged the device in, it caused what the PC later described as “a serious error” – it was unresponsive for several minutes and I had to restart it just to get it to talk to me again.
• the second time, things went better. The device registered, drivers were installed and up popped the VZ AccessManager program that manages devices like these as well as Verizon’s aircards and USB modems. 
• I tried to register the device using the program, but the first time around it failed. The second time (once I’d found an activation item buried in one of the menus) it worked. 
• at this point, the device was finally ready for use.

I switched it on and looked for the wireless access point on my MacBook. Nothing. Refreshed: nothing. Finally, it showed up – it appears that it takes quite a few seconds for the device to be ready after being switched on – nothing too wrong with that, I suppose, once you know. 

The SSID is a long string starting with Verizon MiFi2200 followed by a unique 4-digit number (although if they sell more than 10,000 of these things I guess those numbers won’t be unique anymore). Logging in requires an 11-digit numerical password which is helpfully provided on the back of the device in case you forget or need to show it to someone else using your device.

The first thing I did was run a speed test using my laptop on Speedtest.net – results below:

That’s 1.4Mbit/s down, 360kbit/s up – not too shabby. 178ms of latency – not great, but not terrible either, and fairly standard for WWAN networks. Of course, this is based on the nearest server and so on, so your actual speed is in most cases going to be slower since most of the websites you access aren’t within 50 miles.

I hooked up a second laptop to it and ran a Hulu video on that one while I retested the speed – it came in at around 1Mbit/s, so it seems to handle multiple connected devices pretty well.

So in what situations would this be useful?

The question is, why do you need a device like this? Why not just use a USB modem or similar device that doesn’t require separate power (the MiFi does, of course)? Well, one that sprang to mind immediately was my work laptop, which is so locked down that it’s impossible to install anything on it, including the software that comes with most aircards and modems. I’ve never been able to use any of the several USB modems and aircards I’ve received from Sprint and others on my work laptop because I couldn’t ever install them. Assuming you’ve got somewhere else to get the thing up and running first, this is a nice solution – since it just looks like another WiFi network to my work laptop, it works just fine.

Beyond that fairly limited use case though, are there any others? One that immediately occurred to me (and, I think, was suggested by someone at Sprint last week) was hooking my iPhone up to it while out and about for a speed boost. Theoretically, this only makes sense if AT&T’s 3G network is slower than Verizon’s, which isn’t necessarily true, but I thought I’d give it a try. Using Speedtest.net’s iPhone application (warning: iTunes link), I ran three speed tests – one each for my home WiFi (connected to a 20Mbit/s FiOS connection), the MiFi over Verizon’s EVDO network, and the iPhone’s own 3G connection. The summary is below, in reverse order:

The details are here, in the order I described above (home WiFi, MiFi, iPhone / AT&T 3G):

Obviously, my home WiFi with the superfast backhaul was quickest. But the MiFi also beat the iPhone’s own 3G hands-down – by about a factor of 2 on the dowlink, although very similar on the uplink. Why is this the case? Possibly the particular place where I tested the two networks has better Verizon than AT&T signal. Possibly the design of the MiFi gets a stronger signal than the iPhone. I don’t know for certain, but I won’t complain about that doubling in speed. (Slightly off-topic, I also wondered whether the iPhone’s WiFi capabilities are capped at 10Mbit/s – I regularly get very close to 20Mbit/s when testing my home connection over a laptop).

I took the device with me when I went out to run some errands and discovered that a dead spot in AT&T’s network at the local mall (ironically right by the Apple store) was no longer a problem – I had the MiFi on in my pocket while I checked email and Tweeted from my iPhone and had none of the normal connectivity problems. Use case found.

In theory, there are others too – the marketing materials from Verizon suggest family roadtrips, construction sites, college students in study groups, insurance agents on the road and conferences. All are reasonable suggestions, though most would be just as well served by a USB modem. 

Conclusions

In summary, I found that:

• The MiFi provides good speed – even an improvement over the native 3G on my iPhone, and plenty of downstream speed to get work done on the road
• The activation process was cumbersome and would have been a show-stopper if I only had my MacBook. I wonder why an activation process involving installed software and drivers is even necessary – the thing never needs to connect to my laptop after that anyway – why not just let me activate it online and avoid all that hassle?
• There will be some use cases for some people – but probably not for everyone, and that’s fine. USB modems will be just peachy for many people and some people don’t need a mobile broadband connection at all
• I haven’t had it long enough to worry about this or really be able to comment on it yet, but compared with a USB modem I can imagine that remembering to recharge might be a pain.
• The device is truly extremely portable, to the extent that you could chuck it in the same pocket as your phone without an issue and would probably forget it was there (as I did).

Thank you Verizon, for sending me a trial device. I’ll be using it quite a bit over the next couple of months until I have to give it back. It’s probably also worth noting that the underlying device is the same as the Sprint device that also launched recently, so most of what I say here would go for Sprint’s version too – including, most likely, the network performance, which should be similar on Sprint’s EVDO.

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I came across a blog post the other day that highlighted an interesting activity Verizon is toying with at the moment in the social telco space. It’s somewhat tangential to the core of what being a social telco is about, but it’s an interesting model nonetheless and certainly something worthwhile for other telcos to think about. I hope Verizon will be reasonably open about sharing the results of the experiment and what they learn from it.

I have since found the source press release on Verizon.com and there’s some more detail there. Essentially, Verizon has set up online fora for its customers to go and seek out answers to questions or solutions to problems, and many of the responses will come from other customers rather than Verizon employees. The Verizon Community Forums, as they’re known, cover all of the major consumer services Verizon offers, including mobile services, and the front end is split into various product and service categories so you can quickly browse to the one you need help with. 

The press release reads, in part:

The Verizon Community Forums have become the company’s hottest online venue for consumers to submit questions, share advice, and get answers about Verizon’s robust portfolio of broadband, entertainment and communication services.

On the forums, customers can interact with each other, ask questions, problem solve, and learn more about the company’s products and services. Answers posted on the forums most often come from the community’s highly active members, referred to as “super users,” an important subset of customers critical to the success of any online community.

According to Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon, the Community Forums have been well-received since rolling out last July, generating more than 10 million page views.

“The Community Forums have spurred interaction among customers because people today expect to be able to find answers to their technical questions online,” said Studness. “The feedback we’ve already received shows that our customers value the personalized peer-to-peer advice and feedback they receive from fellow users.”

The fora aren’t actually all that different from those you find on various other customer support sites, with a good sprinkling of official Verizon personnel keeping an eye on things and picking up on issues that can’t easily be resolved (a set of customers was seeing commercials interrupting and playing over regular programming, for example – something no fellow user can resolve). But ordinary users are providing lots of the answers, including on fairly technical topics.

One of the most interesting aspects – and something which takes this beyond the standard fora and into true web 2.0 territory – is a tool which allows active helpers to accrue “Kudos” by providing helpful answers to others. Part of the site is a “most kudoed users” page which lists the user Justin profiled in the Verizon press release in the number one slot. Kudos (treated on the fora as the plural form of something called a Kudo – a sort of virtual currency) are awarded by members to those who provide particularly insightful answers or solutions. The Kudos have no value beyond the warm and fuzzy feeling and / or sense of satisfaction or pride they engender, but they seem to provide motivation enough, again in true Web 2.0 fashion.

None of this is earth-shattering, and AT&T is doing some similar things with its business customer support, but it is a good example of the kind of thing that’s possible and an encouraging sign that telcos are thinking a bit more imaginatively about some of these issues.

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I’ve just concluded a day and a half with Sprint at their annual analyst day. At this point I’m sitting at Kansas City airport – one of the easiest to get through in the world – unfortunately waiting for a few hours because of a delay to my flight. But this gives me an opportunity to set down some thoughts while they’re still fresh in my mind.

Housekeeping & links

I wrote up my thoughts on last year’s event here. More posts on Sprint can be found at this link. I used Twitter to share some of my thoughts as the event went along and you can see that thread here.

First, the good news

Sprint’s come a really long way since last year’s event, and it’s made progress in several key areas. Dan Hesse (the CEO) has the same set of three priorities now as he outlined last year, which is always a nice surprise at these events! They are the brand, financial stability and the customer experience. And on the last two at least I think they’ve made significant progress. Financial stability is much approved to the point that the company is throwing off a decent amount of cash, has a more manageable (though still substantial) debt burden and is improving margins. They’ve also done a sterling job of improving the customer experience, where the key proof point is the 40% reduction in calls to customer care they’ve seen over the past year.

The company is now in a much better place as a result. Many of their customers have experienced improvements in customer care and in the overall experience of being a Sprint customer. Neither customers nor investors need have significant concerns about the short-term financial viability of the company. And the launch of the $50 unlimited Boost plan has turned around a key metric for them in the past quarter – iDEN net adds. That opportunity is a really great one for them for the foreseeable future because they can add a ton of customers at very low subscriber acquisition costs (1/5 of postpaid adds) and zero incremental capex because the iDEN network is so empty. 

The senior executives were approachable and frank, which is always refreshing. Dan Hesse himself was available to the analysts for informal conversations over dinner, along with many of the other execs, and the new CFO is disarmingly frank and blunt. Both tell a good story. And they have achieved an enormous amount over the past year in these key areas – that progress is impressive and they deserve a good deal of kudos for it.

Now, the bad news

The bad news is that it isn’t yet clear how Sprint is going to turn around what is now its single biggest challenge – continuing net subscriber losses. Even though churn is improving, and that’s a big step, the problem is gross adds, which continue to be well below where they should be, and massively lower than they have been in the past. No-one is adding as many subs as they have in the past because the market’s slowing down, but Sprint at least needs to win its fair share, and it hasn’t done for some time now. What I was looking for more than anything going into this event was a solid story about how Sprint will grow gross adds, but I didn’t feel like we got it.

When I put that question directly to Mr Hesse, his response was that the gross adds strategy was everything they’d talked about over the day and a half. While that’s part of the answer, my overwhelming impression was that all the initiatives are very long term, and we’re left (along with Sprint) waiting for them to kick in. A constant theme throughout the event is that perception lags reality, and while Sprint has improved network performance and customer experience, these are things that will take a long time to flow through into customers’ perceptions and even longer to flow through into non-customer perceptions. 

Other things Sprint is “waiting for” (in my view) are:

• 4G rollout – yes, in theory, Sprint will have a two-year edge over Verizon and an even bigger edge over AT&T. But it will only roll out a handful of markets this year and only make serious progress next year. And handsets won’t begin to show up until late next year. And in the meantime customers who don’t live in the mostly tier 2 markets that will be first to light up will not see any impact
• The Pre – yes, this one is coming soon so the wait shouldn’t be too long, but there were echoes of the many mentions of the Instinct at the last event and the great hopes placed in that device. The Pre is a more truly competitive device than the Instinct, but it won’t be a real game changer for Sprint anymore than the Instinct was.
• Economic recovery – a large part of Sprint’s performance among business customers – especially in the Nextel segment – is dependent on economic recovery, and that may be some time in coming. 
• Brand rollout – Sprint is changing is brand messaging again (in contrast with Verizon, which has had a fairly consistent message for 7 years, and AT&T, which has been consistent for 3), and I’m still not convinced that the new branding makes any more sense than the old branding. Even if it works, it will take considerable time to kick in.

I don’t want to give the impression Sprint is simply sitting around waiting for things to happen – it is proactively working on its three key priorities and making progress in all three areas (though I’m most dubious about the brand, as I just mentioned). But these are all long-term initiatives with an uncertain payoff at the end, and in the meantime there is little Sprint is doing that will provide a short-term boost to postpaid gross adds. 

In summary

Sprint is undoubtedly in a better position than it was a year ago. It has solved many of the fundamental issues it faced then, and made improvements in other areas. But I remain concerned that they don’t have a long-term strategy that gives them a clear view of when they are likely to see positive postpaid net adds again. All the other things they’re doing are good, and will improve other metrics including margins and cash generation. But unless they can start growing again they will remain subscale compared with Verizon and AT&T – their two most significant competitors – and will have significant cost disadvantages flowing from that lack of scale and the fact that they’re running two separate networks. 

Over the next couple of years, if Sprint does start to present a more significant threat to the big two, they will respond aggressively, and I don’t think Sprint will be in a position to fight back. It has less cash to spend on advertising, it has less headroom to increase device subsidies or otherwise make its offerings more attractive, it will be operating on three network technologies which are becoming increasingly marginalized (iDEN, CDMA and WiMAX) when competitors are operating on LTE and gaining all the scale advantages that will offer. 

Having said all that, I’m genuinely excited about the Pre. From what little we saw of it, I was impressed that it will be a compelling device for people willing to put up with the perceived shortcomings of Sprint as a carrier, although the impact may be significantly hampered by whatever Apple and AT&T announce in early June. I also believe that if the 4G rollout is handled right it will be the one true differentiator that Sprint has for mainstream customers and could provide a good boost (no pun intended). And the management team at Sprint is smart, focused and hard working with a track record of executing on a clear strategy, so if anyone can do it, they can.

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Last week I posted a link to the comment I wrote for Ovum on the topic of the Social Telco. While I spent some time in that piece talking about what that actually means, most of it was context, so I wanted to expand a little on what I mean by the Social Telco, starting with the drivers behind this shift.

Two major reasons why telcos need to become social

There are two major reasons why telcos need to become social:

• their users are migrating to other platforms and leaving the telco behind
• telcos are bad at creating services and need to tap into the innovation happening elsewhere.

I dealt with the first of these in the comment I linked to above and in a previous post and so I won’t return to it in depth here. Briefly, customers – especially those we might describe as belonging to Generation Y, and also referred to sometimes as Millennials – are increasingly bypassing the wireline telco (and to a lesser extent the mobile operator) when communicating with friends and family. As such, if telcos want to have commercial relationships with these customers, they need to find ways to re-engage them and that means going where they can be found. 

Secondly, telcos are abysmal at creating new services that customers actually want. I’ll deal with this in more detail in a later post, but the major barrier to telco innovation has been the industry structure. Equipment vendors sold to engineers, who decided together with marketing which features to switch on. Of all the major new forms of communication that have emerged over the last 20 years, telcos have been responsible for none. Telcos are in a poor position to experiment with new services, too – everything they launch has to be scalable, robust and integrated with billing systems and so on, which makes timescales long and requires a high degree of certainty that a new product or service will succeed, which drastically limits their opportunities for experimentation. Internet players are in a much better position and have a far better recent track record, and telcos can benefit from this work. 

Aims of the Social Telco

If those are the two major drivers, then the aims are closely tied. Essentially they are to:

• create alternative channels for customers to access telco functionality
• enable the creation of new services combining that functionality with functionality provided by other players.

Part of the wireline telco challenge is that people don’t see the relevance or benefit of using wireline telco services to communicate, but part of the challenge is also the business models associated with those services. Customers no longer want to sign contracts requiring a large monthly outlay for a service which is only available at a fixed location and provides little flexibility. In part the challenge is therefore to create new channels for customers to access their core functionality in such a way that it becomes useful and attractive again. But in addition, the aim should be to enable the creation of new services which tap into that telco functionality and integrate it with functionality found elsewhere.

It’s not about creating Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts

At a very basic level, the Social Telco could include the sorts of things we’re seeing from many telcos today as they seek to take a few tentative steps into the world of Web 2.0. Setting up Twitter accounts to broadcast press releases, creating promotional videos for YouTube, blogging, setting up Facebook pages and so on and so forth. These activities attempt to place the telco on the same plane as the users of those services, as if it were an individual participating in a natural fashion in social media. Of course, this is an illusion, but it may be effective anyway. That Sprint Twitter account has just over 2000 followers, some of AT&T’s videos on YouTube have been watched 250,000 times and so on.

But in these activities, telcos are no different from any other large company seeking to embrace the new media – there’s no real leverage of telco functionality or core competencies. And these activities don’t really overcome the basic problems that telcos need to solve. So although this is related to the Social Telco area and may be part of a larger social media strategy, it’s not the main thing I’ll be talking about.

The focus should be on APIs with effective controls

Telcos need to go significantly deeper than this in becoming social, and this effort effectively comes down to APIs and other technical linkages between telcos and third parties two facilitate a two-way exchange of functionality. Many web players already expose some of their core functionality to third parties in an open or semi-open fashion, and others are moving in this direction. Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, Google and many others have openly available APIs which developers can use to create new applications and services.

Telcos on the whole do not have APIs to expose their functionality to third parties. This is again a natural result of their heritage – Internet players are software-based whereas telcos have historically been hardware-based. But that is changing – most new telco services will reside on application servers and be software-based too. As a result, telcos will increasingly need to embrace the software model and so hopefully the opening of APIs will be a natural outgrowth to some extent. 

One of the challenges associated with APIs – as Facebook and others have discovered recently – is that users want the benefits of openness but without sacrifices in privacy and control over how their information is used. Telcos will face the same challenge but on a greater scale – any time the data telcos hold on their customers is released, whether intentionally or unintentionally, it creates a firestorm in the media and among consumer rights groups. They therefore have to be particularly sensitive to questions of privacy, security and user control.

A new model for service creation

All of this will lead to a new model for service creation for telcos. Not all services will be developed in this way, but an increasing number will. The two major models will be operators creating new services themselves either incorporating social web features or made available through social websites, and third parties creating applications that incorporate telco functionality. The former will expose telco functionality to new audiences and create new channels and business models for using it. The latter will enable the creation of many more services which tap into that functionality by an army of third party developers, which will combine telco and social web functionality in innovative ways. Together, these will open up many more commercial opportunities for telcos, allowing them to re-engage with customers they may have lost, and extending the ways in which they interact with their existing customers.

A couple of important points – mobile and enterprise

I have focused in this post on wireline operators, in part because they are in the most dire need of assistance in this area, and in part because mobile operators have some more obvious short-term opportunities around social networking. But these same principles apply equally to mobile operators, and I firmly believe they should be thinking about them too.

Secondly, I’ve focused a lot on consumer trends, but these trends apply to enterprise too. In fact, the first Social Telco activities I’ve talked about were those of AT&T in the enterprise space. The applications are different, and the focus will be more on opening interfaces to third parties, including enterprise customers, than on exposing telco functionality directly within social networks, but the principles are the same, and activities can be shared between consumer and enterprise functions at telcos.

Further reading

I’ll be covering some of this stuff in more detail in future posts, and specifically plan to post on each of the following (I’ll try to come back here and add links as I post them):

• Why telcos need help with innovation
• Do mobile operators have the best opportunities as Social Telcos?
• What functionality should telcos expose?
• How telcos can move beyond one-to-one communication
• Creating new business models and channels

I’d be very interested in any input on any of these topics as I address them in the coming weeks.

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