Good Morning. After reading this post last night I applied some thought to it and then quickly fell asleep however it did not stop the thought process. I have been going through the geo-tag topics and applications the last few days and can't help but think that there is a map, call, profile connection.
Check out www.feedmap.net and the memorymap tag in Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/memorymap
also a simple photo geo-tag service at http://www.geobloggers.com/index.cfm

I am thinking that having a geo-tag option added to profile would alow a map to appear in the profile or even pop up when a call comes in, whether this is a built in feature or 3rd party app, I'm not sure. The main point is to encurage and build connections and networks that are active and interesting and that go beyond the practical call A to B uses that we have come to treat the everyday phone call.
This might be a little off of the topic that you posted but this is what I came up with.

Encouraging freedom to communicate.
gjw

Hey Graham!
You must have had a good sleep, because those ideas you found are very refreshing. If you missed a discussion on Mates http://www.gigaom.com/2005/05/04/mates-when-social-networks-marry-presence/from Om Malik check it out.

Thanks for sharing...

Regards, Bill

Census data. How many skypers by location (country, state/province/city). Skypers by language. By gender. By age.

What information do people put in their "About Me" profiles? Look for blogpulse-like trends in terms used (how many people put the words "I can..." or "I want...". Hot links/domains.

Activity. How many calls? What times of day? How far are people calling? Chat stats: length in time; number of parties in a chat over time; percent of chats that result in voice/video or other mode, and vice versa.

I'd like a Skype Development Index. I talked to James Enck about this when he was crunching numbers by country and comparing it with broadband users.

Effectively we know the share of Skype users for the top 20 countries adjust that to be a share of 100, then look at broadband household for the same set of countries and calculate that as a percentage.

The Skype share of users over the share of broadband penetration will provide a useful indicator of over and under developed countries. 100 is the average. I'd predict that Poland and Israel are high BDI countries while the US would be low.

Typically the rewards of operating or launching new services in high BDI markets are more attractive.

I'd think some more interesting calculations could be done with "call rates" by country.

The real need for statistics are twofold. One there are personal statistics. The more personal these become the less likely I would want them shared. However, it's always good diary managment to know where your time goes and with who etc. There are also new forms of personal statistics possible, re chat times, conversations that span text and chat and video VM etc. Also in this statistics list is the hard history. The calllist doesn't do it as it fails to organize the data into monthly or weekly buckets. Thus there is no statement feature. Archives are poorly integrated.

In the public realm the Skype site could share more data straight away. eg number online at any one point in time. Numbers by country are interesting although don't tell enough about the amount of time people stay logged in for, or the number that are continuously logged on. Similarly are Mac or Linux users bigger zealots of Skype than Windows users or do they remain undeveloped relatively?

There is usage and adoption data that Skype also can't access directly that is fundamental to developing Skype. Thus Skype can't track distance between two callers, and I presume similarly can't report on number of conference calls etc. That probably screws up their minutes calculation!

The research survey piece is a passion of mine!

It would be interesting to see the adoption rates of different countries and if they correlate to other social or technical trends.