I just got off the phone with two teenagers from Brooklyn, New York. Gamers, both, who wanted to check that I was really from Skype Journal. It wasn't enough looking at the Skype Journal web site, they wanted to hear me talk, to say aloud "hey, I'm real and I'm the editor here."

There's a lot of getting-to-know-each-other going on in agoras. It is a practical, personal thing. It improves decision making because so much of our trust metrics are based on first impressions. I'm reading Blink now, because it is so on-topic.

Most of Skype's users have been individuals and their friends. And when used in businesses, they have, mostly, been small or home businesses. Skype just hasn't had the plumbing needed to do large scale or complex organizational telephony.

That changed Monday.

eBay directed Skype's management to continue undermining telcos everywhere. But they also added a charter: Skypify eBay. And that makes eBay Skype's first enterprise customer.

We'll be covering and analyzing this, but I see several excellent outcomes for Skype's ecosystem of users, developers, portal partners, and hardware vendors.

1. Skype will have specific problems to solve with measurable results. A year from now eBay will be getting a report that says "18% of Elvis Figurine auctions started a Skype call; 83% of those resulted in a sale." Focus on user behavior is a killer app. Skype can learn to listen differently and more. Cross-fertilization ahead.

2. Skype will address scale and complexity. How do you let 5000 people into a conference call for a hot auction? How do you extend the Skype names and profiles to work with eBay's more detailed and commerce-focused user identities? How can I dial a "room", like a product or a market category, instead of a person? The solutions should look good for all users, especially as they are rolled out in software, public APIs, specifications, and protocols.

3. Skype will open the client to eBay's developers. There is too much to do and everyone will want to expose their own parts of eBay through the Skype client. Remember, Skype is eBay's live, in-the-now, Offical eBay Time desktop presence. Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, and every other portal are busy packing the best of their web sites into their clients. As Skype opens up their UI to eBay's internal developers, they will open it up to the independent developer community too.

4. Skype will professionalize its operations. Skype hires brilliant designers and programmers. To Skypify eBay, Skype must shift being a garage band to becoming a symphony, from hand crafting code to becoming a sophisticated design studio and software engineering factory. The alternative is for execution to stifle innovation. As Tallin's agility embraces engineering discipline, everyone will see a new flowering of volume, speed and creativity in Skype's products and platforms.

5. Skype will mobilize eBay. As Skype's software continues to migrate to phone and PDA devices, eBay features will come too. You won't have to be at your computer to follow an auction, to bid, to browse Craigslist, or pay your bookie (you use PayPal for that, don't you?)
   
6. A house of repute. They will work out how to blend reputation derived from social relationships (Skype), transactional behavior (eBay), and institutional certification (PayPal).