How do Rachel Happe's and Chris Brogan's Three Untapped Values of Social Networks apply to real-time social networks like Skype?

"Social Networks Capture Unstructured Information Well"

Skype IM and voice calls remove barriers between thought and utterance. Skype makes it easy, convenient and safe to talk informally, like blogs, wikis, twitter, and mobile texting. Skype gets out of the way of just plain talking. Contrast that with the formal tone of writing memos or more structured communication, like reports or proposals.

Capturing Skype conversations is easy too, almost automatic. You can set your Skype Privacy settings to keep chat history forever. A handful of audio recorders can capture voice calls (PrettyMay Recorder and Sharer, Skylook, Callburner, Evoca Call Recorder, Pamela, Call Recorder for Mac OS X, AfterBeep). Pamela even captures video calls. Skype's History tab shows what you missed and what you did.

Your records augment personal memory. Moving them into shared spaces (like blogs, wikis, podcasts) contributes to collective memory, and to increase their findability.

"Social Networks Provide a Trust Filter"

Do you live in a world of information overload? Your friends help filter the spew, as do your colleagues and other trusted sources. Finding the good stuff, the relevant bits, is a often a team activity.

People earn your trust by a mix of

• social endorsement (friends of friends),
• familiarity (you trust those you know), and
• experience (Courtney knows his hockey).

Skype makes your social experiences explicit and searchable, at least by you. For example, you can see how often you've talked with someone.

Your conversational history has always informed your choice of information sources. Now you can see it plain as the data on your screen.

More to the point, social networks apply the wisdom of crowds to our news filters. This brings the judgement of many people to search relevance, emphasizing the judgement of those you trust more than strangers or those you distrust.

"Social Networks Improve Information Speed"

Velocity matters. Information gets stale fast and advantages go to the early bird.

Both flow and speed are rising. Ten years' ago, the early blogosphere spread ideas when search engines got around to them, hit or miss. Later, RSS feeds made updates nearly real-time. Now aggregators like Bloglines and Google Reader feed your inbox with the latest updates from your trusted sources.

Skype speeds up transmission. Skype is a real-time, word-of-mouth, narrowcast channel. Skype lets you change the nozzle from a laser stream to a wide spray with direct chats, contact groups, persistent group chats, and the Skypecasts service. 

But it's not just the technology...

Your social circle creates lots of information. Information created near you (social proximity) means fewer hops from start to finish, less distortion and less time. With some channels, like microblogging, people spend less time writing/editing/optimizing; that speeds things up too.

Not all circles are equal...

Memes propagate better on social trust and on proven communication channels.

• How much does your circle share?
• How often and well do they add metadata, nurturing each others' data adding tags, links, comments?
• Does your circle overlap with related circles?
• Do interpersonal skills smooth over rough spots?
• Does your circle replenish members, keeping your membership at a workable level?

Skype helps you garden your social network. Skype's persistent group chats cultivate trust slowly, with little pressure. Skype's international flavor also helps cross geographic and cultural divides.

These three capabilities (capture, social filtering, and distribution) build on Skype's value as a knowledge management and collaboration tool.