Over-the-top Web 2.0 services are generating profound business and technical impact in the Telecommunications industry. On the business front the industry is reacting with deployments of Web 2.0-type services and by exploring nontraditional business models. On the technical side, Web 2.0 communications services such as social networking and microblogging are triggering a major change in the way communications services are architected. The foundation of this transformation is the intensive adoption of distributed and parallel systems technologies to design architectures that scale cost-effectively from thousands to hundreds of millions of subscribers. This paper will examine how to design horizontallyscalable communications services through the use of distributed software systems techniques. We will examine key patterns that are emerging and focus on the middleware software required to design and build such highly scalable systems, specifically targeting communications and data management middleware.