Matt posted here about the mistakes Facebook has made viz a vis privacy and beaver beacon (I DO think “Facebook Beaver” has a better ring to it!).

He rightly says that innovative telcos (headed by BT who are using a platform him company created), seeing their traditional revenue streams dissipate, are having to find new revenue streams to replace POTS and directory 1.0 services.

SO what is the connection between beacon and BT? They’re both going down a similar road but starting at different ends. Facebook trying to “business-ise”, “monet-ize” and “commerce-ize” social networking, with BT trying to “communit-ize”traditional comms and directory.

It is however a long road and neither BT nor Facebook have yet to identify (or at least react to) the mammoth opportunities they have to reinvent commerce. The analogy I like to use is that BT has deployed a fantastic 2.0 style communication tool that unfortunately tries to integrate with a transactional model that is very steeped in Web 1.0.

I surmise that the “killer apps” of tomorrow will be bolder and will create methodologies of rolling the entire transactional sphere into the communicative sphere that we’re already seeing built and used.

So who out of the telcos or the social media players can do this? To be honest I’m not sure. Telcos have the benefit of experience while SM players have the benefit of agility – at the moments I’m saying that they’re both neck and neck but the next twelve months will show who is likely to win the war (and not just the battle).

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.