Can telcos provide all-in-one magic cloud app?

So Google has come up with its own Facebook killer, Google+. Let’s hope, for Google’s sake, that it is more popular than some of its more recent flops like Google Wave. Let’s also take into account that News Corp has finally unloaded the once doyen of social sites, Myspace, at a considerable loss.

Early reports state that Google+ is a worthy competitor to Facebook but who in the world wants another big social networking portal to contend with. Sites like Facebook, once thought of as the bastions of Generation X and Y, have now become universally acceptable. So much so that teenagers have been heard to mumble and Tweet (they don’t actually speak anymore), that Facebook used to be cool until their parents started using it!

Universality could well be the kiss of death for the bigger sites that probably explains why there are so many niche players popping up. Being part of a worldwide ‘friend-amassing’ network might be great for the ego, but there are times when you may just want to be part of a more select group of people with common special interests.

How long will we be able to sustain, or more importantly, put up with brainless Tweets about what the stars had for breakfast, what perfume they wear and even what toilet tissue they prefer. Too much information? Brain overload? Yes, you would think so, but we still continue to spend countless hours each day keeping up with the senseless banter that has become the core of social networking today.

OK, so these views may be a little extreme and sound like the ranting of an old man, but even work-related sites like LinkedIn are tough-going unless time and effort is put into understanding the best way to extract value from them. If your company happens to run its own online community, Salesforce.com, Twitter and blog sites you will know how time consuming just keeping up can be. And that’s not including e-mail and RSS feeds!

This is where something like Google Wave, if better constructed and offered by someone else, could have been a big winner. The whole idea of having one portal or application that monitors and collects info from all your favorite sites and puts them into one summarized window that, by a single click, expands into the viewing screen for that particular portal, allowing access, editing and exiting swiftly. Imagine that?

Sounds a bit like the cloud service and app from heaven. Imagine an enterprising and innovative telco (no, that’s not an oxymoron), investing some money in developing this type of thing. Think of the stickiness factor, the ability to host and process everything in a virtualized, cloud environment and minimize the traffic over the network. Providing a service everyone wants and minimizing the traffic from ten or more social and business networking sites into one manageable stream. All from someone that can be trusted. Now we’re talking!

Next I will be told someone is already doing it. If they are, please let me know, because I will be the first to sign up.