Belated Birthday wishes to Skype who just turned one. As I post this there are 625,000 users online. The numbers in Skype's first year letter are interesting. Despite what Kevin Werbach says I think Skype is the largest effective VoIP network. The other IM systems still can't substitute for a phone call. In a second piece of news it was noted that Skype has about 100000 paid up customers for SkypeOut. That is a respectable number for a month. It also cost them a lot less than Vonage!

At the same time they have released Skype for Mac OS X Beta and I've made my first calls with Mac users. Hurray!

Over our first year in operation, the number of broadband users globally has passed the 100 million mark and continues to grow rapidly. Skype has approximately 9.5 million users, consistently more than 500,000 people connected via Skype at a given moment and more than 1.5 million users per day. Skype customers have already spent more than 1.2 billion minutes engaged in free Skype-to-Skype calls. More than 2 million SkypeOut calls have been initiated. Skype

Skype isn't the only VoIP product of its kind, but it has by far the most users. SkypeOut has about 100,000 customers, Zennström said, generating what he hopes will be the beginning of a solid revenue stream. MercuryNews