Skype Journal

I’m looking at today’s Inbox Love Conference agenda through a filter of Skype product and ecosystem strategy. What can Skype learn from email’s long legacy? Where might they fit together?

• A unified inbox – with chats, social/work updates, emails, events, tasks, and calls – would be very useful; one place to check. http://mail.Skype.com? Twilio’s Jeff Lawson is speaking on this.
• Rich caller ID. Rapportive could easily tell you about incoming callers and the other people in chat rooms. They could deliver a rich, social-media-informed caller-ID for incoming Skype calls, assuming Skype offered a useful web platform or in-client extensions.
• With inbox overload comes the need for relevance filtering. Xobni could easily offer data mining of Skype conversations. That’s if Skype offered real client extension or cloud platforms. Xobni’s Jeff Bonforte will speak.
• Most inboxes barely tell you about threads of conversation, let alone relationships. The folks at Graphight could help you renew old relationships, cultivate valuable ones, and invest in those that matter to you. Skype lets them fall off your radar if you’re not careful.
• Spam, identity theft, and other security issues apply to both; crossover of lessons learned?
• Email is part of our identity infrastructure. So are telephone accounts. When will we trust Skype accounts enough to authenticate users for authorizations that matter?
• Email was one of the first identities that let us participate online anonymously, pseudonymously, or as ourselves. Skype could be better at giving us more control over how we present and identify ourselves to different people.
• Hosted email is becoming the rule, not the exception. Yet the ability to migrate gigabytes of archives from one email account to another isn’t universally easy or even promised. True for Skype history and archives too, still tied to a given desktop and not stached (stash + cache?) in the cloud. Offer a graceful exit, please.
• Inboxes come with contact lists, accumulated from the spew of email from subscriptions, strangers and acquaintances. Skype offers few opportunities for weak ties to become contacts, or for discovering potential friends, family and colleagues.
• A contrast: Email is used for formal communication; IM for casual and collegial conversations. Do you break how the tools are used when you mix those contexts?
• Email traffic had been losing out to instant messaging for years. Now IM (down 8.3%) is losing out to chat and updates inside of social networks. Clearly, conversation follows (a) where your friends are and (b) where the context is fresh and relevant. Do you have more friends in Skype than X? Do you find more things to discuss inside of Skype?
• Would you want an email/Skype gateway? Email a message to a Skype name? Read it in your Skype client? Reply from Skype and read it in email? IM’s backed up or mirrored on a list server? Could be very useful in collaboration.

image credit: Claire Graves from Poke London from when she worked on the 2009 Skype Store makeover.