A friend of mine, metablogger and social media scholar Lilia Efimova, is from Russia, lives in the Netherlands, and is married to Robert. This so you can follow her post which I'm lifting in its entirety from her Mathemagenic blog.

A few weeks ago we had a very special incident. My mom thought that I was around home computer with Skype logged in as Robert and started a chat. In Russian.

Of course, it wasn't me next to it, but Robert himself. He went to an online translator, figured out what my mom was saying, got his reply translated and posted back. First my mom thought I was making fun of her typing strange Russian, but then she had to believe that she was chatting with Robert. Both of them were very happy and very proud that they found a mode for direct communication despite of speaking different languages.

Thinking of opportunities that this discovery could bring (=not having to translate back and forth between family members :) I thought that it would be great to find an automatic translator for Skype chat. I found one - ULRTMT - Universal Language Real-Time Message Translator, which is in difficult to install beta. Haven't tried it yet, but already happy since these times things develop fast.

On a side note - it took ages to get my mom on Skype and she is still learning ins and outs, but I'm so much happier now. Between other small victories is having my grandma talking to me (wearing "I look like those guys from Spaceship control center" headset) and giving her a video tour of our house in real time.

Now, there are a few more things before my familyskyping project brings real fruits: get other family members on Skype, make sure my mom finds their webcam and my brother installs it, configure properly for my new Bluetooth headset so I don't have to change the settings manually...

A few of my closing observations:

• Note the Skype infection spreading through the family vector. Not just within her household (Lilia to Robert, I think) but also across households, to her mother. Someday genealogists will be mining Skype social networks to discover family ties.
  

• It's still true that ease of setup and ease of use are barriers to adoption and use. Despite this, early adopters bet their time, attention, and money on a developer's future stream of improvements and innovation. This stream is the Skype developer ecosystem's brand.
  

• Language remains a solid barrier for social network growth. While Skype breaks down barriers of distance, only realtime human interpreters (now) or machine interpreters (later, slashing the price of just-good-enough translation) can blow open the markets for conversations.