Jan Geirnaert blogged his Skype broadcast software. Send one chat message to five consecutive Skype contacts, you pick the starting contact. They are working on an unlimited contact version that will reach all your contacts, selected ones, or all members of one of your Skype contact groups. Jan's design hobbles it to minimize SPIM, spam over IM. For example, he could easily have added a crawler to scour Skype IDs from the Internet, add them as buddies, and then send a commercial message to a million strangers. More on defensive software design this week.

Julian Bond's program extracts his contacts' locations, converts them into geodata, and passes them to a database which puts them on Google Maps. Data visualization becomes more important when you manage your thousands of contacts from Ecademy, the alumni association, your friends from the pub, ex-girlfriends (OK, that's a short list for me), colleagues at work, etc. As we migrate Internet use to mobiles, we will be managing our day bouncing our contacts' physical and social proximity against our daily goals and social contexts.

They're both alpha stage prototypes, but they illustrate some of what Skype's APIs make possible. They could lead to new product categories, especially in the workplace or any other sphere calling for strong communication, coordination and collaboration. Phreak on!