Exactly.

SJ. This is very wiki in flavor. Has this been influenced by Skype's internal wiki?

I think philosophically there is an overlap with wiki. With any wiki, not just our internal wiki. Yes, people can edit any listing they see, with small exceptions. You can't change the phone number of a listing that has been entered by someone else and you can't change other people's comments. But if you see a typo in a company name or you know the address, you can add these things, even if you didn't create the listing.

SJ. What are your business goals for SkypeFind?

Yet to be worked on. Right now SkypeFind is a pure and unmonitized service. So all the content is user generated, there is no advertising model involved, and there are no business listings. We are looking in this space as well. However, we have decided that in case we bring in commercial content to SkypeFind, then we definitely will separate it visually and mark it clearly as something different from the user generated or social content.

For now, we decided to start with a zero record database and see how it picks up with our user base. We strongly believe in that content getting there.

There was Forrester research quite recently about consumer behavior on the Internet. It said a whole quarter of U.S. consumers have used a commenting service or rating service or participated in discussion boards around the businesses they use. So I think people have a drive to share their experience and share their ratings and bash somebody who has been bad and praise somebody who has been good to them. If we give them a very simple and integrated user interface to do so, they will.

SJ. Right now, the directory is just of businesses. Have you looked to expand to cover other things?

Around Skype there are a number of directories already, if you think about things like Skypecasts - a directory of events. We might do something with bringing other types of listings together, but for now SkypeFind is focused on businesses and we try to do that part very well.

SJ. Are there any features you wanted in this first release that you didn't have time to get in?

Not really. We wanted to get a very simple neat version out there and listen to user feedback, and see where we can improve. So we are all ears right now.

If you look at the Internet phone or IM applications, no one has done something similar before. It's a learning process for us as well.

SJ. eBay integration. Right now in SkypeFind I have to identify a business by a unique phone number. In the worlds of eBay or Amazon, the vendor is just a user ID in a specific context.

Right now SkypeFind is intentionally focused on phone numbers, as you can see the logical connection with SkypeOut. We are planning to add Skype user IDs to make people happy or support people who have brought Skype into their business as a communication tool. You are aware of Pay-Per-Lead, something we are doing with eBay and other partners. Even though SkypeFind and Pay-Per-Lead are different products, we can see them coming together sometime in the future.

Some of the SkypeFind Community Guidelines language is vague. For example:

"You should not submit comments or keywords or any information that is unlawful, offensive, abusive, indecent, obscene, racist, discriminatory or menacing or which does, or is intended to, cause annoyance, inconvenience or worry, or which is fraudulent or defamatory"

I'm sure lawyers got involved, but the concern is that the definitions of these terms vary by locale. So it is difficult to enforce and to be fair. There are some things that are broad about it. For example, if I say a restaurant's service sucks, and it costs them business that would be annoying and inconvenient to them and might worry them about lost business. So would literally violate your terms.

This is not really my area. But the right direction to think about this is the Wikipedia space. There are many parallels. So if someone bashes your restaurant on a wiki you can go and correct it, it can go back and forth for a while, then you can report the concern to Skype which is a functionality we have included. There should be enough layers of protection.

I only saw western languages in the system. Will you be supporting non-western languages as well?

Character set wise, we' re ok right now. As anything we do in Skype, we localizing.

Are you doing anything to expand the statistics, the metadata generated by the system? For instance, indicating popular tags or popular searches or hot spots in the world, and exposing that back to the users?

We have that data coming from the system but no decisions about exposing that.

Is there some way for me to have some link on a web page to my entry in the directory? Or a review-my-site link?

Right now there are no permalinks you can launch.

Where does the data live?

It is a server based solution, as opposed to peer-to-peer.

Are there any plans for a web version of this?

Technologically it is quite simple, however as you can see the social part, or the relevance brought in by your contact list is a big part of the value here. So taking it to the web and making it anonymous would lose that part.

What are your plans for an API (programming interface)?

I know we have some plans. The keyword "API" is on our roadmap but I haven't looked at that functionality yet.

What do you hope to learn in the next thirty days?

Probably a lot about people's activity. Is there a growth in listings in a way we expected? Does it disperse somewhere geographically? Do people add new content or review what other people have already added? And naturally all the other business statistics behind that, like how many clicks on the call link we get.

I think that's the start. Probably we'll see comments on blogs and coming directly to Skype in our discussion forums. I think we're quite open to see what happens and what users think.

Who came up with the magnifying-glass flower icon?

Our designers, our creative folks.

How are you spreading the word on SkypeFind? Is having the tab enough?

Yes, I think it is, for the searching reason. It will be integrated into other places in the Skype client. For example, if you have a SkypeOut contact on your contact list, then you can add it to become a SkypeFind listing. Also we can embed it, for example, when you finish a call with a business, we can immediately ask if this call is to a business and do you want to rate what happened on that call.

How often will that tab be updated?

Due to very early beta, we don't automatically update it. It updates when you change the country or if you right-click on the tab. Statistics on the bottom will update as well.

(trying an update...) Alex is in Hawaii. It also shows he added a place near me in the Bay Area. That's information I didn't think about from before.

Your default country - the "where" field - is derived from your profile. It defaults to your local stuff. I travel into London a lot so I've been checking what kinds of good restaurants are in London.

Where are you based?

I'm from Estonia.

How long have you been with Skype?

I've been with Skype since summer 2005, about one and a half years. I started off as the general manager of Estonia, then I took over global operations for Skype, and since late last year I've worked more closely with product. I've dealt a bit with devices and about two weeks ago I joined the eCommerce team and took the GM role here.

Does eCommerce include the Skype store and the partnerships that go with that?

The devices and hardware stores are a separate topic. The eCommerce team deals with Skype extras and personalized stuff.

Between the extras and SkypeFind, we're seeing more things being built into or bolted onto the client. What other things would you like to see added to the client if you had all the time and money in the world?

Client real estate is something we think is very precious. Because one of the main drivers behind the success of Skype has been the simplicity of the user interface and the ease of use. So we consider very very carefully what we do in the client and what we don't want to do.

It's very tough to throw something out there. Think about Skypecasts. That big, colorful directory of Skypecasts is something we're keeping on the web. It turns into a client part only when you're participating in a Skypecast and the listings appear as in a conference call.

Probably that's a good example of what we want to do with the client. To be very sensible and see that we don't bloat it with different types of new features but keep it usable.

I was looking for tapas and realized I wasn't getting listings for Spain and France, just for Spain. Same thing for companies wanting to list in more than one country. Have you looked at a country called the Internet?

Not the Internet, but yes, the discussion is going on around if and how we execute on this for businesses that have a Skype name but no physical address.