Skype 4 and Twhirl with Seesmic illustrate centralization and evolution of Web 2.0 tools

This week we’ve seen both the release of a new version of Skype—Skype 4.0 Beta 1 for Windows initial release – Skype Garage—and a preview version of Twhirl that includes Seesmic playback—Seesmic Blog: Play Seesmic videos in Twhirl client—while they haven’t been connected previously, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Looking at the new Skype, it draws and centralizes your attention to the task at hand, communication with others.  Twhirl is doing the same for microblogging.  We’ve seen this before and when it’s happened great things have always followed.

When?

First the web browser.  Remember gopher and newsreaders and the other required tools to view the “Internet” back in the 80s and 90s?  Remember when all of these started to converge in the browser?

That started Web 1.0.

The other example I have is Exchange and Outlook.  These happened at about the same time, but had a whole different set of results.  Before Outlook, we all had separate apps for email, calendar, contacts.  Sure some of them could be integrated (I used Now Up to Date for example), but they were still separate, then they came together.

I’d venture that this began the push of PDAs, not the birth, the push.  We saw that these things should be together be cause they were so centrally connected.

Now we’re seeing it again.  Skype is, I think, brings such focus and your attention to chat, video, and calls, that it will have to have influence and repercussions.

Twhirl, on the other hand, is much closer to that shift.  Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic … read, post, share all together in front of you.

The next phase I’d venture is something to do with RSS and other information flow.  Snakr has become indispensable for me to monitor the flow of news.

So if when we bring similar things together, we can then see the next jump—I’d say we’re going to be seeing some pretty exciting things soon.

What?

I have some ideas and I’m going work on them and write a follow up post (my gut tells me it will have to do with the nature of how we create and share content).