In the spirit of full disclosure, I personally and my company, SMBLive, are obviously betting that BT and other Telcos will indeed become significant and rightful players in the race to combine social networking and online advertising into a logical and elegant service for both small businesses and consumers.
Obviously there are lots of other competitors following Facebook’s lead to build application services that effectively tap into a social graph – but given the Telco’s legacy strength in connecting people via communication channels – and given their legacy strength with advertising directories in the old days of the phonebooks – I think it’s entirely reasonable to think they are well positioned to play a significant and rightful role in this critical game.
To be fair, I am naïve about the challenges inherent in working with Telcos as a primary distribution channel – and even casual observers of telcos would be right to question their ability to innovate rapidly and their appetite for protracted and agile investment in Web 2.0 software development.
Where does the canary go? And who will follow fastest? Only time will tell.