Shooting at Bubbles

The short answer – no.

The longer answer is that it could be hiding under our noses.

I suggest this as a result of reading an interesting post by John Furrier over at SiliconAngle where he extrapolates from a different post by Jeremy Wagstaff.

The short form of John’s post: Skype.

The longer version has John suggesting that Skype does indeed hold the potential of being in a better position than either Twitter or Facebook to become a building block of a real-time social web.

I think that Skype has a bigger opportunity than Facebook and Twitter if they leveraged their core product and user base to go after new markets like the Social Real Time Web. I agree with Jeremy above – Skype is positioned in "real" terms.

While all the hype with social networks, social media, social gaming, and social currency goes "supernova", Skype is actually dominating "real social networking" and "making real money".  Their installed base number are ridiculous – I’m hearing on track for 800m users.  The product and market opportunities for Skype are intoxicating.

He then goes on to make some solid suggestions as to how the Skype team could go about achieving this. All this has John very bullish on Skype and after reading his post I can see why and the idea does make a lot of sense.