The Skypecast service, announced today, is a fun and useful app. A quick and dirty internal project, about a month old, it lets you log in to a Skype site and create a public voice auditorium for up to 100 people. If you catch this in time, we'll be hosting Skype Journal forum - Today's Skype Announcements - Good, Bad, Great, or Useless? today at midnight Eastern, 9:00pm Pacific, GMT

I love it and will be using it.

But Skype didn't give the people in its third-party Skype developer programme or their online partner programme the tools to build it themselves. Skype staff built the plumbing, then built the app, but kept the plumbing closed to the public.

Skype must carefully and quickly build out their application infrastructure. Their focus must be on seducing entrepreneurial engineers, enterprise IT technologists, and phreaks around the world to a rapidly evolving and increasingly capable Skype platform.

Investors must care. In the coming battles for control over technical standards, over market share, and over conversational commerce, Skype will need friends. In particular, Skype will need a strong, confident, committed ecology of businesses building on Skype as a platform. Skype's bizdev seems up to the task, but Skype's API remains an afterthought.

Who is the product champion at Skype for the API? Which senior executive is driving the client and service APIs forward? Who is committing developer headcount to architecting and constructing server APIs and server agents?

Skype's independent developers want to know. Now. Some certified partners have told me they are limiting their investment in the Skype platform for just this reason, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL and other platforms to be the beneficiaries.

There are many bases for competitive success. This one is key.