Skype Gets Its Avatar On — The End of VoIP?
Glitchy sends along a press release from Skype and IT/telecomms company Comverse Technology about Skype Klonies, the new avatar personalization feature available to Skype users. (Dial it up here.) Like Saul Klein, Skype’s VP of marketing, I’m sure this will be popular. “Recent surveys we conducted show that personalization capabilities are important to the Skype community,” Klein says in the release. What the release doesn’t say is that you have to pay for your Klonie (which didn’t stop me, of course; it was only about $1.25, but for some reason I got charged in euros).
Strangely, my new Skype Klonie has got me thinking about whether VoIP has much of a future as a standalone service. Read on.
Considering the number of 2D avatarization services that have been popping up lately, which let you concoct a not-all-that-interesting picture of “yourself” to attach to some piece of your Web presence, it seems to me that the moment for such things has passed. Skype Klonies do little more than seek to capitalize on the market’s desire for something deeper, I’d say. As sloppy as it is, MySpace lets users express themselves much more. Pasting a cartoon picture into my Skype profile doesn’t do much to get across who I am. It’s fun, for about 90 seconds, but I’d wager that something better’s going to come along fairly soon that will make these services a thing of the past.
The more interesting possibility is that the market’s desire for self-expression and deeper connectivity will turn the VoIP market on its head. Perhaps in the future, as a generation of deeply connected kids grow to become the biggest swathe of society, most VoIP services will be offered as a component of some other Web-based service, in the manner of Vivox. That’s an interesting evolution to contemplate: the end of VoIP as a standalone service. Will it happen? Not sure. Not necessarily soon, anyway. But it will be interesting to see how much of VoIP is done outside of other applications and how much is done as part of something like a social networking site or an online game or a virtual world as we go forward. I wouldn’t be surprised to see standalone VoIP fade into a smaller proportion of the market within the next generation.
Feeds
I dunno - I think standalone VOIP will stick around. There are plenty of times when you just want to talk with someone, rather than having an immersive experience. Ditto IM clients.
I actually think you’re right, Pete. But I do think that VoIP will increasingly be subsumed into other social network (and to a certain extent immersive) Web experiences. Not completely, just increasingly. But not for half a generation (5-10 years?) or so.
With so many people coming to use Skype this reminds me of something my friend Garry said about virtual worlds and avatars:
“It sounds crazy to most people, but in a few years we’ll see non-VW people self-reflecting on how much these things have pervaded their life in small ways, like, “WTF? I have an avatar? *I* have an avatar? *Me*??”"
lol Yep, bringing people in through the back door (”I signed up for voice communication, not a virtual world” but there it is: your first avatar). Go Skype go. I also agree with Mark that the little cartoon avatar may not be so engaging just yet, but I dunno, if they stuck this Logitech avatar-puppeting tech in there, sheesh, man, that’s potentially explosive:
Phillip Torrone becomes a video avatar (via Reuben Steiger’s blog)
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It doesn’t matter so long as voip calls can still be made on their client.
Mark,
You make an interesting point about today’s kids wanting a more integrated service in the future.
I have to agree with Pete that I think there will still be a demand for stand alone VOIP services, I think there are a lot of people who will not embrace the
social networking sites (mostly the older generation).