Pip.io.. Yet another Social Support Community option for SMBs?

As I continue to think about the framework that is Social Business Design I continue to grapple with how companies will practically manage the various social streams that they will want to leverage.  It is clear that Social Support Communities (SSC) will be a critical tool that many companies will want to deploy, but the question, of course, is what is the right tool my company.  For Small and Medium sized businesses with relatively small customer bases you would be foolish to spend a lot of money, right?  That’s where Pip.io may play a part in your future…

I had the pleasure of chatting with Leo Shimizu, CEO of Pip.io, last night.  For those of you who have never heard of Pip.io, check out an interview from Robert Scoble from six days ago.  Leo shared a couple of interesting thoughts with me:

“Pip.io is a social OS that is made up of two distinct domains: the “social” and the “OS” aspects. The “social” aspect refers to our own native real-time communications platform. To define communication, we focused on understanding the real-world privacy spectrum and representing those scopes of privacy digitally. The spectrum ranges from the most private and intimate (for example: 1-on-1 IM chats) to what we refer to as global voyeurism (for example: Facebook & twitter). But what about all the privacy scopes in between? That’s exactly what your brain is wondering if you’ve gone to Facebook or Twitter to find yourself holding back what you wanted to say because you were worried about who would ultimately see that post. Pip.io helps you easily and simply define your audience so you can communicate on the web as you normally do in the real world.”

While I think Leo might be stretching things a bit by using the term OS (operating system) I do feel that Pip.io is onto something.  They are building towards something much broader than simple aggregation of social content.  You can be very selective with your content distribution so that the right audience receives the right information.  You can communicate with other users within the Pip.io platform, with user’s in your various twitter accounts, your various facebook accounts, heck, even Netflix…  To that end, Leo points out:

“We treat the different scopes of privacy as abstract concepts. It just happens that our native ecosystem uses these privacy scopes to create environments to facilitate conversations. However, a third-party can use these privacy scopes to facilitate anything they want. For example, we have an area called “Rooms”. In it’s purest form, it is an environment where you invite people and people accept the invitations to join. For example, Netflix could use the “Rooms” API to facilitate the invitation process for their group synchronous watching feature.  The traditional definition of an operating system has been software that connects third-party applications with hardware resources. With what we’re seeing with virtualization and cloud computing, the consumer computing experience will revert back to a terminal form. So when hardware resources are gone, what is the next logical resource we could help mediate that would benefit both the consumer and third-party developers: social resources. We essentially created APIs for different scopes on a real world privacy spectrum, thus the “OS” aspect of Pip.io.  Developers will be able to use our API to create rich applications that take advantage of Pip.io’s real-time platform and enable users to communicate exactly how and with whomever they want.”

Wow, great concepts that could make it easy for any individual user, or SMB to fully leverage social channels via Social Support Communities.  Segment your customer communities across appropriate Twitter Accounts, Pip.io rooms and channels, and bam, you’re off to the races.  Okay, so what is a channel and what is a room in Pip.io terms?

• A channel is a one-way distribution channel.  You can add various social accounts and individual users to a channel, designating that they will receive the content you push out through that channel.  For example, if you know of a problem with one of your products there is no reason to notify all of your customers.  Push the message out to that one channel and you have very easily pushed the word out to just those users.
• Think of a room as a live meeting.  You invite people in for a two-way conversation.  I need to spend more time with rooms but the example that Leo discusses above ( the Netflix example) is interesting, great way to do training in real-time.

Even more exciting to me is the geo-capabilities.  You can watch global updates by dragging around the map (or leaving it at its default location of your home) and see who is on-line and what they are chatting about (for public discussions).  This is cool, no doubt about it, but I am really excited about the ability (not yet available) to selectively reach out to people by geography.  If I was a club and wanted to blast out to everyone in the local area about upcoming shows, select the area, message out… So many possibilities.

It is a beta product though and, while evolving rapidly, is not yet ready to be considered for SSC usage for a business (yet).  Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• On my Windows 7 machine I ran into several problems with Internet Explorer 8.  However, I switched back to Firefox 3.5.3 and it is working great.
• The Twitter client functionality is very weak today.  However, Leo assured me that they will soon be on par with Tweetdeck.  I am sure Leo is probably a bit optimistic but it was good to hear that they intend to make this  interface much richer than it is today.
• There are still far too few people in Pip.io to make it a product you want to live in today.  Much like Google Wave this way only wave is adding people at a fairly reasonable pace.

While Leo and I chatted about other things as well I’ll hold back a few things for now.  As I keep playing with this environment I’ll share more.

John

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