Social Networks, Phones, and Context

Speaking on a panel at IT Expo on Tuesday got me wanting to put down in written form some thoughts on how social networks and VoIP go together.

For decades, the phone was the primary way in which people communicated with their “strong links”. Now, there’s another and very different one, and that is the social networking sites. The kinds of activities people engage in on these sites is wild and wildly varying, especially as sites like Facebook have offered development environments to allow third parties to go wild with integrated applications. But the closest thing to a common denominator is that everybody is engaging in most of these activities together. That’s why they are on the social network in the first place - they are playing games with each other, forming clubs, exchanging messages, and so on.

So the natural question, and one which others have asked before, is how social networks and phones should begin to go together? After all, if you use both to communicate with your friends, and if phones offer personality, convenience of communication, and immediacy where social networks offer variety, convenience of activity access, and , there intuitively ought to be ways to combine the respective merits of each in useful ways.

Some people are already exploring this. Alec Saunders and iotum have their Free Conference Call application for Facebook; at myVox, we have our Voxcall widget, which lets people see when a page owner is online and invite the owner to a call. These are good, important first steps, but I think we all have to agree that they are precisely that: tentative, exploratory probes of the surface of integration.

To get really deep, you need a stronger link, with rich information flow both directions, between the phone and the social network. And a key element of that is the availability of context. Here’s an example:

Say Allan is on Facebook, and he’s flirting with Bel. Programmatically, we can recognize this because Allan is interacting with Bel through an app that describes itself as a “dating” app, or because of the particular actions he’s taking within an app, or even because of the words he’s using. He and Bel decide that they want to talk to each other. Allan picks up the phone. Because the phone is aware of the context, it:

1) preemptively asks Allan if he’d like to call Bel in particular;

2) when he says yes, automatically determines that this is a dating-related call from the above context;

3) automatically masks Allan’s caller ID;

4) shares with Bel’s phone that Allan is calling, and the context;

5) shares with Bel’s phone any other personal information that Allan is comfortable passing on, like perhaps a userpic;

6) shares the same with the Facebook, so its applications can react to the fact that Allan is calling, should there be cause to do so, and perhaps also indicating that Allan is on the phone and not available for other calls.

What we have here is a phone interaction that begins to stitch the social network and phone together. It takes advantage of context, tailoring the phone experience accordingly, and then passing back information to the social network “operating system” from which the network’s apps can benefit. And it’s a pretty basic example, really.

But the current state of affairs with consumer VoIP (the most likely phone-based starting point) is one where we are very far from being able to entertain this sort of thing. On the social networking side, many of the elements are there, though not the sort of generalized and standardized context info that would really help phone services to “read the mind” of the user. The real challenge is with the phone service, and with developing a dynamic caller experience that begins the moment you pick up the handset.

nick AT voodoovox DOT com

GM, VoodooLabs