Skype Journal: Skype's Prime Partner Balancing Act

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Lost in all the blog posts on Skype Prime amid the speculation about how it could be used for a wide range of knowledge exchange and services is the prospect for conflict between Skype and its Extras Gallery partners, BitWine and Jyve. But first to put the motivation for using these services in perspective, I want to repeat the excellent Comment that Alon Cohen of BitWine put on Luca Filigheddu’s post:

A large portion of the world economy is based on paid services. In our days many of those services may be delivered over the Internet.

Premium services are similar to a Blog, the better marketing you have, the better content you provide the more readers you will have and higher monetization.

Information is free, knowledge is not. Customization of the flood of information to a nice answer for an urgent unique problem worth money to people who don’t have the time or the skill on a particular subject matter. They are the people paying for the services.

If you have the time and skills get the knowledge you need for free. No premium call system will change that…

http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/2007/03/skypes_prime_balancing_act.html

Most people are under the impression (mistaken as it may be) that anything you need to know can be found on the internet for free from somewhere.

Before going into that issue, I would like to slightly disagree with Alon’s statement “Information is free, knowledge is not.”

I would say that “knowledge application” is the thing that is not free. The Internet is not a problem-solver. It is a problem finder. There are a multitude of problems that can only be solved through the human interface. Computer programs may be good at diagnosis, but not at remediation.

I think about the things that I can do that cannot be done by anyone else, or as well by anyone else. The key to making the pay-for-service model work is to demonstrate to the consumer that it is impossible for them to solve the problems they have in any other way, or at least, in any other way that is as easily accessible as real-time, web-based knowledge delivery.

The problem, as I see it, is in the nature of the Beast. Even with webcams present, service delivery via the Internet is no more personal than phone-to-phone contact, and, in many instances, is even less personal than traditional phone contacts.

Where there is a ready-made market are the online communities that were established a long time ago and have the kind of consumer stability that marketers dream about.

IMHO, there is too much Skype-hype because ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, and AIM are THE primary online communication vehicles. Not to mention Windows Mewssenger. What I would like to see is a way to cross-link these services, and that may come about through paid advertising.

Skype has a long list of extras, but so does ICQ.

What I have had to do is to subscribe to them all, and make all of my IM ID’s available. But, boy, what a headache that will be for the consumer!

How do they choose among them? How do we direcvt them to Skype in the midst of all these competitors?

Meanwhile, Skype needs to do a better job with its SkypeCasts ans also offer true PodCasts and RSS feeds. Otherwise, they will be left behind.

As for the Internet being the panacea for the knowledge surfer, in a word, “Nope.” There is still way too much garbage out there and its growing quantumly each year. Wading through all of it to find something useful should be getting easier, but it is not.

A quicker way to get what you need is to pay someone to give it to you. That is the message we need to promulgate.

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents.