Don't get me wrong, I love Skype. It's saved me a fortune, and is way more convenient than the alternatives.

But sometimes it lets me down. Yesterday, I was expecting an important SkypeIn call at 4pm. Never came. I was online, for sure. Finished work after 5pm.

This morning when I log on at 3am (hello jetlag), I get the voicemail from that person -- timed at 4.15pm yesterday. So it never rang, and I didn't get notification of the voicemail. Annoying.

I've also had problems with conference call quality at times. SkypeOut isn't as good as BT's VoIP voice quality. SkypeIn is generally pretty good though.

What this is telling me is that the field is wide open for competition in the small-medium business space. And a telco brand could be just as good as an Internet one. I don't mind paying for business-class quality -- I just need something that works at a reasonable price. There are additional feature like web conferencing (synchronised Powerpoint, desktop sharing) that need to be in there too.

PS - Downloaded Sightspeed this morning. Looks like a nice product, but they make the users jump through far too many hoops to get going.

You can miss Martin just as often at the Telepocalypse.

by Jean Mercier, Skype Numerology Blog.

It has been a "very very old complaint" on the Skype Forum that Skype placed some folders in the "My Documents" folder (Windows XP version), without a gentle way to move them to another place!

And version 3.0 is even worse! I am angry too :-(

But the "My Documents" folder isn't the only place where you find Skype folders: i noticed - excluding multiple Skype accounts - 4 main places. You can probably reduce it to 3 main places if you have only one Windows XP user account!

I counted 31 folders in total, excluding the 250 folders in the "chatsync" folder! Therefore, total number of folders in my case: 281! Pfewwww!!!!! And again: this without counting the other Skype accounts folders!

Some comments on some selected folders:

1. This is a new folder with version 3.0 :-(
2. An old one, I always delete the bunch of ugly Skype avatars after the installation of a new version
3. Also an old one: I store all my Skype related stuff there
4. A new one, that i deleted, but Skype created it again, without recreating the deleted wallpapers
5. The first (1) folder with the name "Skype"
6. Plugins, also new since 3.0 i guess
7. Ooh no ...I thought Skype was used mainly by business people!
8. Second (2) folder with the name "Skype"
9. A user account I never use
10. my main user account
11. I didn't want to show the content of this folder: it contains in my case exactly 250 subfolders, i guess with my chat history in it!
12. folders of spare accounts or folders of other people who used their Skype account on my computer (this happens!)
13. third (3) folder with the name "Skype"
14. ooooh, here all the ugly Skype avatars, that i usually try to delete, are stored again!
15. and here again the wallpapers!
16. new since 3.0
17. new since 3.0 i guess

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CaptainAmerica Maverick gave me a bracelet tonight. A Skype presence bracelet. It shows my Skype availability when I wear it in Second Life. And if you're in 2L with me, you can use it to Skype me (I'm "Phil Arrow").

Stephen "CaptainAmerica" Klosky is using Skype's "SkypeWeb", a web service that takes a Skype username and returns that user's public status.

Web services are the life blood of Web 2.0, published protocols that open a company's software engines to programmers. SkypeWeb is Skype's only public protocol.

Skype must do more to empower developers who want to blend Skype into the rest of cyberspace. On Skype Journal's short list:

1. Turn the Skype client messaging APIs into web services. All of them.
2. Skype user authentication as a web service.
3. Directory service for public chats, public conference calls, and open contact groups.

Offering a "Naked Skype," (Skype devzone wiki, Skype issue database) a bundle of protocols to the cloud, would let developers blend Skype with any service, including email (like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!).

Skype is in an earnest race. (Skype management has not acknowledged this.) The company wins who publishes the most complete, friendly web services for live communication. The measure of success: developers everywhere mashing up your communications with their social networks, mashing up your social network with their services. Skype's performance so far: not in the game.

Today, for example, I must use the unscalable Skype client on projects to: 

• Write a web page that shows a Google map of the locations of a logged-in visitor's contacts, colored by contact group, indications of when they are likely to be online.
• Build a web based feed aggregator that crawls urls mentioned in buddy profiles, showing updated web pages and blog posts.
• Run gateways between the Skype network and SIP services.

In the Skype 3.0 public chat, Julian Bond said Skype's new Skype4com ActiveX wrapper gets us partway there. I suppose it does, if all you care about is embedding a Skype widget in web pages or rich clients. So much more is needed.

Web services will unleash the power of Skype's

• communication infrastructures,
• identity infrastructures,
• social infrastructures and collective social capital, and
• commercial infrastructures.

Web services open new markets, attract new customers, reinforce your value propositions.

In Second Life, web services literally open up new worlds. Skype's rivals get it and are acting now. Where is Skype's leadership in this race?

This is the first of three posts discussing Skype's PR management with the aim of improving the PR relationships associated with the launch of new Skype software and associated services. In this post I want to outline the problem; in the second to propose a proven solution:in the third post I want to review the Skype 3.0 beta release activity with respect to the proposed solution. .

If you follow the VoIP blogosphere at all, you may notice that certain products and services, when introduced, get a lot of coverage such that readers can quickly assess if there could be followup interest.  SightSpeed and TalkPlus, whose beta program launches today, are two examples; this did not happen by accident. In both cases, while bloggers are open to make their own observations there is an underlying consistency of message as to what the service provides and what are the key features. SightSpeed focuses on high quality realtime and asynchronous video communications while TalkPlus focuses on delivering a means to manage your phone number infrastructure in a manner that protects individual privacy while providing helpful business and social networking tools.

On the other hand I have done a review of various blogger posts on the Skype 3.0 Beta launch; here is the original press release and a sampling of the initial "first impressions" posts (Ed: with my bolds):

Gizomodo:

The big new feature is browser extensions for IE and Firefox that let you embed SkypeOut links into web pages. ... The re-designed toolbar, contacts and call tabs look much easier to use. And Skype also added moderated public chat features, which makes me all wistful for IRC.

Skype Numerology

Nov. 9: Skype 3.0 beta released. And indeed, the differences between the previous version 2.6.0.105 and the 3.0.0.106 are (from my point of view) quite small, see the change log.

Nov. 11: Mea Culpa: My mistake (see my post below), Skype 3.0 has indeed quite some new features, as explained on the Skype website and in Skype Journal.

Tech Crunch UK

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I could do a long critique of every softphone out there, and there's plenty to pick apart. I thought I'd just select one little detail to show why the portal IM clients and Skype remain top dog: they just deliver what the user wants, no hassles.

Every time I log in to Windows I get this:

Go away! Shoo! Don't irritate me with unnecessary login screens. Fade into the background. I don't want to think about you until you're needed. (If the wireless Internet connection comes up too slowly, it also tends to crash.)

I suppose I should also point out some of the other usability issues. As Amazon long-ago discovered, the way you present the login/new user screen makes a big difference. If it's confusing (high cognitive load) people bail out, probably (rightfully) assuming the rest of the experience inside will be equally bad.

Gizmo fluffs this with a strange radio button layout. In the user's mind, registering is a different process from logging in, even if the information requested is identical. The drop-down text entry box is the wrong cue for creating an account name, because it implies a selection of existing data. (Yahoo is superb at managing this process in a crowded namespace.) Gizmo operates from the perspective of the programmer, not the user. Contrast with Skype:

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I just want to acknowledge that I have had a few reports this week to the effect that Comments are not appearing or, in some cases, have been reported as "not allowed". Rest assured that both Phil and I are disciples of Shel Israel's and Robert Scoble's book, Naked Conversations.  We want and appreciate your comments; we want Skype Journal to be a conversation amongst both Skype enthusiasts and Skype users.

Both Phil and I have been taken away on family matters this week; however, I took a few minutes this evening to check out these reports.  There are some problems which only Phil can address as he is the only one who has experience with managing and supporting our Movable Type platform. He will look into them on his return next Monday; in the meantime you can find the comments (to all posts in chronological order going backwards) at http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/recentcomments.html.

I have seen the three comments about the Skype and US Traction story; they are much appreciated. Thanks... and thanks to all who have commented such as to create a constructive conversation about any post.

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One of the toughest challenges I encountered in managing the Canadian operations of a PC hardware and, later, PC software vendor was to ensure that customer support flows seamlessly between the resellers and the vendor. It is the responsibility of the vendor to set up training and support programs that provide appropriate tools for the reseller but it is also the responsibility of the reseller to ensure that all its support employees get the proper training and support policies in place such that problems can be either resolved or elevated appropriately in a timely manner. Now I know the reseller support people take pride in their ability to solve a problem; however, when the going gets tough they need to understand when to elevate a problem beyond their experience and resources. And to a large degree it is the responsibility of the reseller's management to define that line within their support policies and then to communicate it effectively to their support reps.

The same applies when it comes to mobile devices sold through the wireless carriers. Andy Abramson (VoIP Watch) seems to have encountered a situation where a T-Mobile carrier rep just did not know when to escalate and persisted in tying up Andy's time when in fact the problem was beyond her/his skills and resources. So he spends almost three hours on a Saturday morning talking with a T-Mobile support rep trying to restore his Blackberry into service when after fifteen to twenty minutes it would have been obvious, in this case, to escalate the problem back to a RIM support person.

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I'd like to send my wife an SMS. In Skype I've got a group called "Family", which includes her entry. However, she hasn't filled in her mobile number in her profile, because that means exposing it to anyone she adds to her buddy list.

I can instead create a new entry for her mobile, or enter it directly, so this isn't a massive deal. I could even hand some bonus money to a telco and SMS her from my mobile. It does serve to illustrate a bigger point, though, on how different communications systems can create value by managing privacy differently.

There are several ways of technically resolving the situation. A simple one is that I have a local copy of her profile that I can extend and annotate -- a proper object inheritance mechanism. Another is that I can request her number off her.

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I'm having a chat this evening with a client in Califormia. We'll be using Skype. His job is at a Big Company, but it works OK for him behind the corporate firewall. When we last talked the audio quality wasn't great, so I suspect he's tunnelling out via HTTP or HTTPS via some supernode somewhere. These protocols aren't designed to carry real-time audio, and it shows.

This brings into question whether his internal telco manager is adding or subtracting value. I've had terrible experiences inside big companies using their telephony systems, because nothing integrates with my life. As an IT consultant in times past, I'd have an office landline number I had to put on my business card. I could set up the voicemail system to call me whenever I got a voicemail. Inevitibly, I then ended up with voicemails on my mobile telling me I had voicemails on my desk phone. (No, I couldn't simply forward inbound calls -- not an enabled feature, I guess to avoid paying outbound landline-to-cellular rates.) Then you turn up at a client site, and you can't even connect to their LAN. They're paying a fortune to have you there wasting your time doing dial-up via the fax line to access the information you need. It's as if it it's 1950 and everyone sits at one desk for their whole career.

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Jaanus has pointed out that today, for the first time, over 7,000,000 users were on Skype earlier today.  I usually find Skype peaks at some time between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. EDT. And this benchmark is reached on Skype's third birthday.

Now if Skype would fix the bug whereby presence information is not always current in version 2.5, we could get back to saying Skype is a real time communications service. I have noticed the same problem that Rachel, Rick Segal's very articulate daughter, has blogged about. For Rachel and her MusicIP team associates, Skype and its IM presence/chat engine has become "our office":

I'm criticizing because up until a couple weeks ago, the MusicIP team wasis as dependent on Skype for connecting with one another as an all-in-one-office company would be dependent on the water cooler, or for that matter, chairs [modified because after I thought for a minute...we still are dependent on it - we just complain about it now where we didn't before]. Taking to each other from a number of cities (which is usually at about six, but at other times people could be spread out among up to 10 different places), brainstorming via group chats, or simply sharing an interesting link for a laugh - more than our actual office, Skype is our office.

I have it on good authority the Skype development team is looking into this issue as I write. At the same time, Rachel's experience demonstrates, as Skype becomes mission critical to virtual communities worldwide, the importance of thoroughly testing new Skype releases to ensure they are backwards-feature-compatible. It also demonstrates that Skype's presence engine is just as important as, if not more important than, the actual voice communications features.

Let's hope we don't have to wait for version 2.6 going gold to fix this problem.

Update: Rachel has received a response from Roman in Skype Customer Support. Let's just say it's one more indication that Skype employees have just as much passion for their work as Skype users have for using Skype. Quoting Rachel again:

I've done customer service on an absolutely miniscule scale compared to what he's dealing with on a daily basis; his job isn't easy. We're cranky, we're put out, and we want answers. Roman clearly takes his job seriously and is representing the company he is a part of extremely well. It's not easy sometimes to articulate the right reply to a customer inquiry. But it takes a ton more courage and time to respond to said whiny customer in this much more public format.

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Rick and his family operate one of the most prestigious home furniture stores in Australia. They have been using Skype in their business since almost day one. (Reminder: Skype's 3rd birthday is less than 27 days away... what gift will you give Skype?) Rick buys everything Skype so I value his feedback on the new SMC Networks Wi-Fi Phone and asked him to share his experience with our Skype Journal readers. Here is what he had to say...

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Many people have commented on how Vonage is pimping its IPO to its own customers by sending them a voicemail.

This voicemail doesn't make their phone ring. I'm not sure if they receive any notification of it. In all, it's fairly unobtrusive.

Anyhow, I'm currently completing a questionnaire from my business bank: "Which of the following types of communications do you recall ever receiving (from us): ... [ ] Courtesy phone calls from our Call Centre". There then follows: "Which is your preferred method of contact..." and the predictable list of existing channels.

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Editing Skype Journal is a joy, more so because of the great conversations with and among our readers. Here are seventeen recent user notes to Skype Journal. If you have answers, leave a comment. Diverse is not the word but it's always interesting to look for themes...  

Ross Baldwin:

I know this question will sound redundant, You've tried to explain it so many times before. I'm just ignorant I guess. But, I need some help. I'm 16 years old, and I goto a school where, they gave out Mac OS X laptops to everyone. I want to make a podcast using skype conference. But I just can't see how I can do it. I have the following: Mac OS X laptop with Skype, A windows xp with Skype, Audacity on both. A headset/Mic for the Windoes. I have everything don't I? I just want to have a recorded conference of me and my friends talking basically. The thing I don't get is. If I'm recording with Audacity on the same computer I'm talking into with the speakers, wont it mess up? I need some help. Thanks

VeroBenei

Hi, I have been getting very loud and constant noise interferences when on the phone with "poonamis", something like a "gravedigger sound" that we don't seem to be able to get rid of. We just had to give up chatting through Skype. I did not have this issue with the other person I have talked to through Skype so far. Please advise. Thanks.

Todd Levy

Does Skype send a paper bill in the mail? Does skype mail a detailed statement of the calls you make with Skype, or are those just available on your online account info? Thanks.

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Here's three Skype products that aim to enhance your Skypeing experience that leaves me questioning exactly what I'm buying with Skype Certified. The three products are the VoSky Chatterbox, Jawbone Headset and the Motorola Wireless Interenet Calling Kit. Each provide a different angle on bettering the standard Skyper's headset and as you might expect each has their pro's and con's.

VoSky Chatterbox.

This simple USB device provides an easily portable plug and play speakerphone for Skype. It's simple to use and requires no additional software to be loaded. It has a volume and mute button on top and works probably as expected, as a low cost speakerphone. I'd liken it to the solution we had as kids when we could finally plug in a speakerphone box between the old phone and the whole family sat around. In principle great, in practice it left something to be desired. The Chatterbox is a little like this. It works. It's also no substitute for a decent headset. The caller on the other end of the line will know and possibly complain. Handsfree solutions curently work better with a good set of speakers and a proper stand mic. Locate them correctly and the caller won't get a any feedback. Many laptops work as good as the Chatterbox. If you feel the need try it. Just don't expect it to be a Polycom and ready for the office. For kids it may be more robust than a headset - read youngsters talking to Grandma.

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Deal done. Retail VOIP in the offing? Views later.

eBay has agreed to acquire Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA, the global Internet communications company, for approximately $2.6 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration.

Skype generated approximately $7 million in revenues in 2004, and the company anticipates that it will generate an estimated $60 million in revenues in 2005 and more than $200 million in 2006. For Q4-05, eBay expects the acquisition to be dilutive to pro forma and GAAP earnings per share by $0.01 and $0.04 respectively. For the full year 2006, eBay expects the transaction to be dilutive to pro forma and GAAP earnings per share by $0.04 and $0.12 respectively, with breakeven on a pro forma basis expected in the fourth quarter of 2006. On a long-term basis, eBay expects Skype operating margins could be in the range of 20% to 25%.

The acquisition is subject to various closing conditions and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2005.

Full text of news release...

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These pictures speak for themselves. On the left you have my Plantronics headset. Not expensive and not the cheapest. On the right you have Bill's headset. He paid a lot more for his USB powered Plantronics. The problem is both of these headsets are broken.

The adjusting mechanism is just poorly designed. Bill's is taped... my fix was stuff some paper into it to jam it and ensure it stopped slipping and falling off my head. Despite the price difference in these two Plantronics versions they both use the same crappy plastic adjusting slide. In Bill's case he says this is the second Plantronic's USB he's had and the sound has failed in one ear now both times. Why blog it. The sound was spotty in one ear for me too today. Neither of these headsets has seen years or even many months of wear. They get used in an office environment. They get grabbed when a Skype call rings and quickly shoved on. They both fold up to travel the same basic way. These are still the basic corded kind. Nothing special.

Plantronics is not alone. I had a Logitech headset in the behind-the-ears format. It worked and was more comfortable for about six months before one ear failed. Prior to that, one of the fold up hinges lost its pin and I ended up fixing that with a paper clip. I don't want to wear military tank standard and yet as a simple user I'm finding that headsets don't stand up very well to anything.

So how long should a headset last? Three years?
How many headsets and how much has your Skype habit cost you so far?
Do you have a favorite?
Did you break it or let the the dog eat yours too?

I'd also like an enhancement. I'd like to be able to answer and hang up on a Skype call from my headset. I'll pay the little extra for the feature. I'm yet to see this on a basic headset although the feature is built into some bluetooth ones. Hanging up the call is too difficult for everyone. Make it easier regardless of what IM app one is using.

Stuart Henshall, Skype Journal's publisher, posted his Grade "D-minus" for Skype's developer ecosystem. I think it's too harsh. Slightly. I give their developer program to date a "C".

Two reasons: My metrics biases are a hair kinder. And I cut Skype a lot of slack for their small size and tender years.

"Doctor, the labs are in."

Generally, you model what you want the system to do. You diagram the states and flows. Then you seek out metrics that sense general system health, that help diagnose problems and prescribe solutions.

In this case, you want a large and vital business ecosystem. It's many outside developer subcommunities, several subcultures within Skype, and the processes you design and deploy to keep virtuous cycles going.

Some of my favorite measures...

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