• Telpages search: Now, you can search for .tel information from within the app, rather than having to type in a known .tel name. As well as delivering back search results, a confidence bar is provided highlighting the results that Telpages thinks are the best fit for your search

• Recently Visited .tel Names: In order to save time, and in case you forgot to save previous searches, a cached version of recently visited .tel names is provided in a list.

• Pull down to quick refresh: Whether recently visited or saved contacts, up-to-date information can quickly be accessed by a simple swipe down and re-saved with one click to your contacts

• Share: As well as saving to your address book, you can also quickly share a discovered .tel name, a business recommendation or a new contact by email, twitter, facebook and other services (if you’re following @rikkles or @justinhayward on Twitter you may have seen us testing this). This is yet another great way of easily sharing .tel information with anyone you want

A colleague recently sent me a link to a blog post regarding the New York Times’ celebration of its 80-year anniversary in 1931. It commissioned the leading business, scientific and philosophical thinkers of the time and asked them to predict what the world would look like in 80 years time, so what 2011 would look like.  Whilst a selection of these is only available here and I hope more will be released by the NYT soon, some of those predictions highlights are incredibly close, and I’d encourage you to read them at your leisure.

What struck me when reading these was, not that each and every one of them had applied their minds to something so far beyond them as to imagine a world that they would never be able to see, but to understand that all of their predictions came from a fundamental notion that the one constant that they could rely on was change.

Who’s going to drive you home tonight?

In 2010, we’re so used to change, we perhaps forget that it is happening at all!  Incremental change and incremental innovation surround us, perhaps nowhere moreso than within the technology and devices that are inherently changing our lives at a microscopic level.  Gesture-based gaming, internet connectivity in airplanes, touch screen smart phones, self-driving cars (OK, some not so small changes in that last one!) have all emerged and crept up on us over the past two or three years, making us think how on earth we survived before they were around.

And yet, in all of this, the need to remember that things can change and change quickly seems to have been forgotten when it comes to our perspective within business and communications.  One of very few lone voices caught our attention here at Telnic highlighting the potential concern of forgetting that change is inevitable.  A recent post by Tim Schumacher over at SEDO clearly and comprehensively outlined the threat to businesses (and indeed, professionals) of believing in the hype of social networks in being all-powerful and omnipresent and committing brand suicide by “advertising their Facebook landing pages, Twitter handles or even their iPhone applications”on billboards.

Smile and the whole world smiles with you

Don’t get me wrong.  Social media is fantastic at many things and driving interest, awareness and, in some instances, sales is much easier in the connected marketplace.  The reach and acceleration of communication, some good, some bad, has at no other time had such an impact on people’s awareness and ability to communicate what they think about particular brands than through social media platforms.

What is not so positive is the level of immersion to which brands, often guided by those who are being paid to promote the business rather than to secure their long-term future, are being held.  By ceding control of your direct relationship with your customers, the Emperor’s new clothes of today becomes the company that sheds its existing brand and adopts the transparent overcoat of social media, exposing what’s left behind and with the salesman of the overcoat pointing and laughing all the way to the next customer!

No brand, large or small, needs to lose control to this extent.  Tim’s clear articulation of the threat and his summary point to the fact that these are “proprietary walled-garden approaches” and thus are not directly addressable from the open web.  This is fair enough and completely true; any independence is ceded to these so-called networks and it is a requirement that in order to connect, you join and play by their rules (which they can change at any time), effectively putting a middle-man in control of your relationship with potential fans or customers.  If this is the future of doing business, why are many companies that have previously sold through indirect channels trying to set up direct models now?

Danger, Will Robinson!

Not only is it dangerous to lose control of the point of contact with your customer (and sometimes the connection completely, as per the recent downtime for Facebook  - I wonder how many customers were lost to those advertising solely their Facebook pages on television that day?), but it’s also dangerous to forget the change factor.  Social media is of course today the darling of the web, but just how long is that going to last?  Facebook and QQ are dominant networks in their regions, but so is Skype in terms of size (and in terms of the risks that one proprietary network faces – do we see a trend here?).  What happens if charging models change for internet access or companies or Governments decide that the productivity of the country or organization is at stake (Facebook is the most blocked site on the internet according to a recent study by one DNS service provider, closely followed by MySpace)?  What happens if, heaven forbid, today’s social network de jour becomes tomorrow’s Friendster or Friends Reunited?  Suddenly, your business is a piece of furniture in an empty house where the party goers have gone somewhere cooler, and you’re put out in a yard sale.

Time waits for nobody

Back to Tim at SEDO: “Providers can go out of business, and there is no regulative environment in place.  Seems unlikely? Remember FortuneCity or Geocities?  They were the over-hyped early predecessors of social communities offering easy site hosting.  Nevertheless, Yahoo terminated Geocities in 2009 – after having bought it for a whopping $2.87 billion in 1999.”

The sad fact is that in the online industry, $2.87 billion is small change in the VC world, but back then it was a significant investment.  We’re seeing market valuations of ten times that number when we talk about today’s leading social network.  But we’ve also seen that even in the case of the largest financial institutions, no organization is ‘too big to fail’ any more.  With the recent down-sizing of MySpace in an attempt to provoke a sale, these timescales for failure seem to be compacting.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (turn to face the strain)

So the key to all of this is to accept and plan for change.  One way of doing that is to insure against being overly damaged by that change.  Ownership of your points of contact, as Tim says, is critical in all of this.  It costs little to own your own domain name and renew it annually.  It costs little more than time to own and use a .tel as a point of contact whilst still enjoying the noise and fun that participating in social media is today whilst it’s free and whilst it continues to drive business.  Planning for change is critical to survival.  As Professor Peter Drucker wrote, coincidentally in a book published in 1999, “Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes — it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.”

Now that’s one piece of advice that shouldn’t change over time.

Some social networks that were the shining example of social media just two years ago are struggling.  Take Bebo in the UK for example, which at one stage was larger than MySpace UK and which was subsequently acquired by AOL.  Founder Michael Burke sold Bebo in 2008 for 850 million dollars.  Having invested so much, it has been left to wither on the vine, prompting an announcement from AOL earlier this year saying that it was looking for a buyer.  If one is not found by the end of May, it’s likely that Bebo will be shuttered and will join the dead-pool.

Other social networking sites are taking heed in this change of temperature.  It takes revenue to create a momentum, and that revenue was missing from Bebo after it was acquired.  It also takes a business model to get acquired in the first place, and some are finally waking up to the fact that their users are the ones that are the low-hanging fruit.  Take for example the recent announcement from Ning, the platform that enabled anyone to set up their niche social network for nothing.  Unless you’re an educational institution, it’s the end of the free ride, with fees from $3 to $50 per month to run a platform for your members and no free starter option.  This is a complete about-turn and has had some strong impacts on the favourability of its brand online.

Whilst this is a transparent move into a commercial business model, and one that is of course necessary for organizations to succeed in the long term, moving from a free to a paid-for model without any prior indication is a huge issue for people relying on the service to communicate with customers, partners or friends.  Ning however is not the only platform making this move.  This week, after purchasing and releasing ‘official’ Twitter apps for a number of different devices over the past month or so, Twitter also announced a change to its terms of service, stating that it would be blocking the injection of paid advertising into the twitter stream.  At present, this remains undefined and could quite possibly be used as a step into generating revenue from businesses using twitter in any way to profit from its services.  The difference with Twitter is that many have seen this move coming and others even speculate that a paid model by end users who don’t want to see adverts in their Twitter stream might also be a possibility.  Even so, with the success of Twitter and its increasing penetration in countries that don’t use the computer as the first point of entry to the internet, this business model by stealth again has a reputational issue and the uncertainty may turn both developers and ultimately end-users off.

There is of course another organization that is trying to create revenue from its users ‘by stealth’.  One cannot help also see Facebook’s flip-flopping over its privacy rules, “features” and controls, as well as its recent security scares with the integration of the Like button, sharing information with other sites on the web.  We know how it makes its money, and any attempt to close down information about users is going to impact on that ability.  If the issues are big enough to focus the attention of many Governments around the world, Facebook may just become – along with Google – this decade’s equivalent of Microsoft in the previous decade for legal wrangles.  These can be quite expensive and long-fought battles, and the revenue needs to be found to fight these from somewhere.

But do all of these signs add up to the end of ‘free’?  It’s perhaps a little too early to tell quite yet.  Certainly, there are many different services that provide basic free services with additional paid-for access to additional features or other low-cost communications channels.  But these again don’t command the same level of interest that ‘the big guns’ do from the media and consequently struggle to gain a large enough base in order to become a de facto standard that a majority of people can use as their main communications channel with confidence.

What this does lead to is that 2010 is going to be the year of further disruption in terms of communications choices.  As those disappointed that services are shut down (Bebo users are, it seems, very loyal) or charged for (the jury is still out from Ning’s users’ perspective), many are looking around for alternatives.  The question is, how willing are people to get burned by free services again when it comes to making a choice?  How easy is it for them to port their social graph to other services?  How important is it now to people to be discoverable through more than one service?  And how much investment have they made in terms of their time in investing on those services that the now, for one reason or another, cannot use?

So perhaps whilst this still may not be the end of free, it may well be the beginning of the end of trust in free to be around for as long as people want it to be.  And that trust is an important factor in being able to commit to services with time and value invested in those services.  At the end of the day, it’s interesting to note that recent statistics showed that US teens now prefer texting over any other form of communication with their friends.  Certainly not a free service, but one that’s established a level of trust worth the investment.