You know the line about men and women thinking about sex n times per day? My digital life is more on my mind than sex.
I left my phone in the car. My folks and I arrived in Fairhaven, a neighborhood of Bellingham, Washington, to shop for children’s toys and browse the Village Books store. iPhone in coat, coat locked in car, I went iPhoneless for two hours.
A half-block from the car I had my first phantom limb experiences. I saw an abandoned London red phone booth and reached for my phone to take picture. I settled for a camera but I wouldn’t be able to twitpic that photo or share it with my telephony buddies.
Over the next 120 minutes I wanted to:
price compare books via Red Laser,
endorse an oil and vinegar tasting boutique on Yelp!,
check on expansion packs for Cataan (found something complex to level the playing field),
photograph some beautiful chutney at lunch,
look up Washington State’s counselor licensing (saw an office building full of therapists),
log how far off-diet my meal sent me,
check in from Village Books,
look up that indie-book-seller coalition they belong to,
read about their anti-Kindle campaign,
download the Fire & Ice four-pack to my Kindle app,
snapshot the cover of the last Gaiman book for friends in a science fiction Skype chat,
ask Quora a question about the DIY book industry,
remind myself to pack warmer next time,
read more about Washington State investigations into Whatcom County budget magic,
bookmark a book on business modeling for a friend,
check the hourly weather for that evening, and
peek at my sister’s family Amazon holiday wishlists.
That’s at least 18 reflexive reaches for my iPhone. 9 an hour, every 6 or 7 minutes. According to one recent study, this is more often than we think about sex. And this was just a casual family holiday stroll through a suburban shopping district.
Many of us are getting used to augmenting thought; in our ongoing internal dialog, conversations with others, shopping and working. Life is better with apps and live data. Heck, we think more complete thoughts, plan our future better, and interact with others in more informed ways with our digital life. Each time we reach, we’re getting mind candy, positive reinforcement. Our operant conditioning is strong.
So disconnecting causes withdrawal symptoms. How long offline does it take you to stop reaching for your laptop, tablet or mobile? For the conditioning to break down? Could observing a digital sabbath give us more freedom and control over our reflexes, more power to alter and adjust our behavior? Or should we not bother? Should we accept this new twitch response as an improvement?
This mind enhancement comes with strings and risks.
Does this new conditioning tie us to one company more than others, like mobile operating system publishers?
How can our new behavior shift power among corporations, governments, and individuals?
When you reach for your brain-augmentation-device, are you missing things because of that reach, causing new problems? Can the impulse to reach cause distracted driving, even without the gadget at hand?
At what point does personal dependence become a public necessity, like water, air, safety, and roads?
Can this behavior be exploited like sex? Sexy advertising bypasses our executive cognition and taps something more primal. Are printed www links and QR codes a first stab at triggering our digital reflex?
So here’s the test: Without hyperlinks in this post, how many times did you think to click on something? More times than you thought of sex? Aha!
More than 3.4 million North American Skype users, about 12% of those online at the time, were affected by an ISP service fumble, with reduced or no access to Skype dialtone for up to 90 minutes today. Phyber Communications reports ISPs appear to have been affected by Juniper routers on Level3 networks, including TimeWarnerCable Internet.
UK’s OFCOM drags it’s heels on mobile net neutrality, leaving Skype users banned by many mobile operators. Same in other European markets. Jonathan Browning interviewed Skype’s Jean-Jacques Sahel, head of European regulatory affairs at Skype.
I met a bunch of people at the Enterprise 2.0 conference who don’t use Skype, more who only use it for family video calls, a few who use it for international calls, and several who’ve never been interested enough to try it. It reminds me that, with roughly 180 million active users worldwide and likely only 30 million active in the US and Canada, Skype has a greenfield of more than 200 million North Americans who aren’t using Skype. Building market reach looks like an important strategic goal through 2015. Skype’s net adoption rates (adoption less abandonment) have been large but linear. How will Skype redesign their products and rebalance their portfolio so net adoption rates accelerate?
New rumors iChat may come to iOS. So far it looks like IM, not voice or video. I’d be more interested f iChat came to operating systems outside the Apple universe.
Pre-flight check in at Sheremetyevo International Airport over Skype. @svo_skype connects you to an operator for an interview, like a video call CAPTCHA. News release: Now for “flights operated by Air Astana, Royal Air Maroc, China Eastern Airlines, Estonian Air, Hainan Airlines, Hong Kong Airlines, Iran Air, Jat Airways, Turkish Airlines, Transaero Airlines, Aerosvit, Ariana Afgan Airlines, Belavia , Dniproavia, Donbasaero, Nord Wind, Oren Air, Air Algerie” although Aeroflot hasn’t committed. Yet.
Skype pays musicians to sing Happy Birthday to your friends in their Say It With Skype Facebook app. All the flavors are great but I like The Parlotones’ cover.
New betas: Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows, both approaching feature parity, both now with group screen sharing for Premium subscribers. You can IM and video call Facebook friends from within Skype, although this does not include voice calls (unless you unplug your webcam), conference calls or group video calls. Jonathan Rosenberg explains Skype is hosting supernodes on AWS EC2, is operating a gateway for Facebook identity/directory interop, the calls are flowing p2p through the Skype network, and Facebook is keeping some records about users and their activity. Darrell Etherington thinks this could make Skype even more popular, and Skype should integrate Facebook into Skype’s mobile and tablet apps. Skype promotional video for the release (QuickTime).
Sync contacts. Not just import, but synchronization. Keep my contacts fresh. TO DO.
Sync user profile data. My Skype profile is shallow and often stale. Sync my profile data semi-automatically: “Do you approve this update?” TO DO.
Sync availability. Online, Offline, Busy, In A Call, Do Not Disturb. Facebook has some presence indicators too, from their own chat and from their mobile clients. TO DO.
Sync currency. What’s the exchange rate between Facebook credits and Skype credits? Let me pay for a long distance SkypeOut call with Facebook credits. TO DO.
Facebook updates in the Skype contact list. Give me fresher social objects for talking with my contacts. Make it easier to sort contacts by the last time they updated, not just by alpha or the last time they talked with you. DONE.
Skype history in Facebook’s timeline. Show my friends’ Skype history with me in my Facebook updates. Make it easier to dive back into a Skype conversation from the timeline. TO DO.
Sync personas. Skype is already asking people to create multiple personas, so they log in with one ID for each job and another for home. Facebook will probably offer something similar so you can choose to keep your professional friends from learning too much about your hobbies and dating habits. Skype and Facebook will negotiate the data models and privacy policies that go with it. TO DO.
People search. For all the importance of the Global Index to Skype’s operations, the real value is being able to find the right person to talk with. Both parties could do well to blend their search technologies to improve result relevancy and speed. TO DO.
People recommendations. Skype can’t suggest people you might like or people you might know. Facebook can, so build recommendations into Skype. Skype has very specific data about times of day and places you call from and call to, which Facebook could use to improve recommendations. TO DO.
Events and scheduling. One of the best social objects is an event. Before the call or chat we often plan and invite and schedule our talk. Skype should integrate with personal calendars and with public and semi-public event listings. Facebook’s have taken off as one of the top event directories along with Eventful and Upcoming. TO DO.
Chat interop. My facebook friend chatting with me on facebook while I’m in my Skype chat. We each get the medium we choose. Lots of things to work out including persistence, behavior for adding people to a chat, privacy rules, encryption, archiving policy. STARTED.
Groups sync. Facebook lists and groups should sync up with my Skype contact lists. Define once, update everywhere, always fresh.
Voice enable facebook chat. TO DO.
Video enable facebook chat. STARTED (No group video, no screensharing).
Advertising exchange. Skype has a small but rapidly growing yellow pages business directory, the better for prospects to Skype and SkypeOut your salespeople. Faceskype can cross-sell ads, offer buy-once-and-show-up-everywhere campaigns, improve the sociability and relevance of Skype client ads, offer click-to-call features to Facebook advertisers, etc. TO DO.
Location check-in sync. Start showing my Facebook Places check-ins in my Skype history and offer to let me check into Facebook Places using mobile Skype. TO DO.
Workplace editions. Is Facebook’s Yammer-killer just a rumor? Skype is committing to the enterprise too, so both teams should be imagining together. TO DO.
Comcast briefed GigaOm on their new Skype product (720p@30fps webcam, RF remote control, adapter box with HDMI) and an app designed for television, coming early next year. Some integration with your Comcast account for importing contacts. Skype will only partner with Comcast for the next few years, so too bad if you are one of the 81% of customers served by other ISPs. You’ll have to buy a television with Skype inside or dedicate a computer to running Skype on your television.
Licensed family counseling and psychotherapy over Skype. The BC practice says “the new virtual service removes the factor of geographical proximity, and caters to clients who find traditional settings limiting.” Don’t miss your session because you’re in a small town or far from home.
Gotta wonder if Microsoft would still have bought Skype if they had to pay US taxes on the deal.
A Mint.com infographic using Forbes data: AT&T got $1.05 Billion in tax rebates on FY2010 $18.2 Billion sales. So the US government paid AT&T more than Skype sold all year.
A security hack could reveal your Skype profile and IP address and what bittorrent files you’re downloading. Read the paper from researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, NYU-Poly, and the French research institute INRIA. Your browser gives up your IP address every time you visit a web page so this is most interesting to people avoiding surveillance and actively protecting their privacy. Tip: use a different VPN for Skype and each app you use to avoid the cross-referencing that might lead to blackmail.
The October snowstorms that hit the US Northeast put Skype to work as an alternative when telephony and roads were offline for a few days. A friend in Hartford, Connecticut, wrote “I’m sorta acting as a base for all my relatives and coworkers after this snowstorm. relaying calls and messages and such between people with no power and such. my t-mobile phone has no service. my verizon phone has intermittent failures and dropped calls. skype works beautifully, however if I’m dealing with peoples’ cell phones, they’re the weak end of the call.”
Jim Courtney: “If Skype wants to have a viable developer program we need to see results soon that can bring revenue to the developers.”
Skype renamed the Public API to Desktop API. More accurate.
Dan York: “Meanwhile… is this renaming setting the stage for the release of some new client-less APIs? Let’s hope so… ” Dan worries the new realtime communication features (WebRTC/RTCWEB) being built into nextgen browsers will be hidebound to PSTN telephony instead of new over-the-top networks.
Skype is quietly retiring old thin-client services for UK mobile operator 3. Courtney says “I would imagine 3 would have to be working on a strategy to phase out its initial Skype service and transition their customers to newer platforms.” Still available in the UK, Ireland, and Australia for now, it has been discontinued in Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, and Sweden. Andy Abramson: “like so many sideline projects that ‘proved things’ now Skype is back to being just a IM based calling service online with a few hooks to the PSTN.” 4G and smarter phones are relegating Skype thin-client services to developing markets.
Download Skype for Windows 5.6. This update fixes a few bugs, unbundles Google apps (Google is retiring its Desktop which bundled Skype), and gives credit for third-party components. Or get 5.5 (5.5.0.119) which corrects some issues with the Skype home page popping up when in compact mode, fixes memory leaks in Skype Click-to-Call.
30.5 million people signed in to Skype at the same time on Monday, 10 October 2011, a new high-water-mark for Skype dialtone since the end of March. A seasonal thing, fueled by more than a million people downloading Skype desktop apps in the days before. I’m guessing about 180 million active users this week.
Just for comparison, Rafe Needleman reports “Zynga revealed that there are 232 million active monthly users of the network, and 60 million daily users. The company records 2 billion play minutes each day.”
RIP Steve Jobs. All sorts of milestones in my career were directly influenced by Steve. My first job out of college: selling Apple IIs. First well paying job after being down and out: Mac desktop publishing for an artist. First dive into design as a discipline: studying about the anthropology research that lead to the Mac. First usability research: books on the difference between the mac/windows/command line.
I had a poster of the NeXT in my bedroom for years, after I saw Jobs demo one at the Berkeley Mac User Group in the old round Physics lecture hall. the idea that you could engineer hardware to support a Unix operating system AND make it even friendlier for newbies than a Mac was gobsmacking. The whole stand-on-a-stage thing and carefully tell your story was part of my toolkit long before he showed his mastery of that, but Steve added a real appreciation of the subject matter, joy for the value he showed, excitement for the geekery.
The iPhone wasn’t my first mobile phone, or even the first I loved (I miss my N90 sometimes). It was the first that made me use it like a computer, made me want to build apps again, dream the entrepreneurial dream. and keep the internet in my pocket. Damn. Damn. I’m typing this on a MacBook in a pizza joint down the street from the Apple store. And they’re playing sonorous sad music.
Michigan State professors want a law to permit distance weddings. Their proposal. Adam Candeub and Mae Kuykendall support e-marriage and e-ritual in all 50 US states. “States should authorize marriages of those not present within their territorial boundaries. We demonstrate that states have the sovereign power to authorize marriage performed anywhere, and historically have blessed marriages in distant locations.”
Skype disrupted international telephone companies, displacing billions of dollars of hard currency with free or very cheap services. Their success has them banned in some countries and declared “an enemy of the state” in others. Didn’t stop them from partnerships with mobile operators from Hong Kong to Italy.
Roughly half the Internet has tried Skype on a personal computer, a mobile phone, or in a device. Skype isn’t ubiquitous but its brand is. And Skype continues to grow.
Why? What does the future hold?
As for why Skype’s been successful…
Skype’s timing was great, several times. Just in time for broadband to make consumer VoIP practical for millions. A few years’ later, just in time for a lift by eBay’s brand (did you know Skype was an eBay company for half its life?), Skype was able to hire GIPS expats and ready itself for the webcam explosion. And when the world economy imploded in 2008, Skype was a large enough network that people turned to video calling as an alternative to travel (airlines hate Skype).
Skype partnered intensely. If you could bring a million new users to Skype, Skype cut a deal. Large national web portals have Skype sub-sites, laptop manufacturers preinstall Skype on Windows, mobile operators install Skype on Android phones, and you can find Skype on TVs and soon on game stations.
Skype focused on customer acquisition. During its eBay years, Skype pursued new users at the expense of product innovation.
Skype gets the viral business. It takes two to talk and Skype made sure you had every reason to drag your friends and family into the network. Skype keeps removing roadblocks to onramping and adding reasons to subscribe. This could be Skype’s first billion dollar year.
Skype delivered real value, consistently, affordably, to millions of people.
So, a few longer-term Skype predictions:
In 2011:
Microsoft will close the deal.
Skype will have more than 1000 employees.
Luxembourg will become Skype’s HQ in name only. Palo Alto is the new Luxembourg.
Microsoft Watch starts covering Skype closely.
In 2012:
Microsoft’s Skype division will absorb the Lync business unit.
Lync will be rebranded Skype.
Skype will launch its cloud products.
Skype will hit its Q1 peak of 35 million concurrent users, 220 million active users.
Victims sue Skype for not offering emergency dialing after a family dies.
Skype’s new cloud loses the US Presidential campaigns to Twilio, powering team and phonebanking apps.
A Skype toolbar and skinny-client comes with a new release of Internet Explorer.
Skype fuels LinkedIn chat.
Hackers reverse engineer Skype’s p2p network, make it public. Vulnerabilities and prior hacks exposed.
In 2013:
Skype for Mac catches up with Skype for Windows.
Skype for Windows Phone has cooler features than Skype for Mac.
Skype ships on the next Windows, in the next Office.
Skype becomes just one of thousands of products using in-browser WebRTC for calls, presence and IM.
SkypeKit becomes a standard component of Windows.
Skype kills the former Lync product family as PSTN hardware sales drop sharply. Lync becomes a Sharepoint feature, phone stations are all mobile, tablet or PCs.
Skype works with with Windows Live Messenger IM and voice.
In 2014:
Skype will generate one quarter of its revenue through Microsoft internal customers. Bing ads, Xbox subscriptions, Office, Windows.
Leaks reveal Skype cooperated with law enforcement in a totalitarian regime to shut down resistance. Leaks prove false.
Facebook drops Skype as a partner, as their internal pendulum swings to owning.
The Vatican IT department picks Skype as its telecom standard.
Skype for Layar brings talk to augmented reality RayBans.
In 2015:
Skype will deliver one billion minutes of live talk through developers using its cloud platform services.
Skype will generate one quarter of its revenue from platform services.
Skype and Bing launch YouTube competitor.
Skype is banned on student tablets in 903 school districts as a distraction.
Half of all televisions come with Skype inside or in an attached box.
Mass exodus as pre-Microsoft Skype employees fully vest and leave.
In 2016:
Phone banks using Skype for Web prove decisive in Get Out The Vote campaigns.
Facial recognition plug-ins reveal micro expressions and give live commentary.
Stallone Skype’s fighting instructions to his son in Rocky Junior.
In 2017
Platform products deliver half of Skype’s revenue.
People need more power over their data. If you think so, vote for my SXSW panel called “Let My Data Go! Open data portability standards.” I need your vote before Friday, September 2nd. This will let us bring this issue to an important audience.
“Another year and corporate silos still hold your data hostage? Our panel will review technical standards that restore personal control of personal data. Privacy is a happy side effect of personal data control and of new business practices, communication protocols, and IT technologies. We’ll highlight progress on all fronts and list the top reasons companies give for keeping their control over your data.”
I’m drafting a stealthy startup’s data portability policy; disclosure is a practical way to live up to these values. And even though I’m a director of the not-for-profit DataPortability Project, the exercise is still difficult. Tracking down the answers, having the abstract and detailed conversations across the company, making time for a policy document are distractions from readying for launch. The policy will get short shrift for a month or so.
Meanwhile, these engineers have been architecting some elements of user-centric data portability into their products from the ground up. I love that portability values will be part of this company’s DNA. What’s better is these founders and engineers are not the exception; personal control is now a central tenet in tech startup culture.
Our panel will recap exactly how organizations are delivering portability today. So vote for my panel right now! And spread the word: Let My Data Go!
I’ve long been a fan of Rebecca MacKinnon, a reporter turned Internet civil society advocate. Society’s multi-decade conversation about privacy, censorship, and access are turning into a fight for control over the Internet. It’s a contest between government, corporate, and citizen power. Rebecca uses her TED talk to tell stories of this conflict among these three powers. And she challenges us: “how does the Internet evolve in a citizen-centric manner?” Rebecca’s coming book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom, discusses a need for technology changes and political innovation “so the Internet serves the world’s people, and not the other way around.” She describes the symptoms of this power imbalance in her talk, but I hope Concent is prescriptive. What’s the path to a future where both companies and governments are accountable to free citizens?
Lord, I don’t want to give this talk. There has to be someone better qualified. But it’s time there was a talk on 20 things we hate about WordPress. Our community is strong enough to hear the best complaints, whining, sarcasm, and harsh truths of the last year.
Plug-ins and themes whose authors can’t document a line of code or be bothered to explain anything for those who come to clean up their mess.
Plug-ins that don’t work with each other and a WordPress that doesn’t let you avoid or debug that.
Theme mills that make bland the new generic.
The amazing plug-ins that define WordPress as the ultimate tool for SEO content farming.
Hosts that pitch WordPress support but can’t be bothered to upgrade PHP past 4.2 and three-year-old databases.
Fame. Because a rumor Justin Bieber tweeted his Skype name caused a swarm of new Skype downloads, new user accounts, and millions of futile IM and call attempts.
Skype partnered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to offer a special version of the Skype client for its relief workers. Now OCHA, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, is working with Voxbone to deploy 888 phone numbers so entire agencies can be directly dialed wherever their work takes them. This is a new-school approach to low-level telecom plumbing, akin to coming up with a new internet country code. Should scale nicely and be immediately useful. Relief services demand the most from information technology, challenging assumptions about user conditions much like war and the Space Race did. Partnering like this can uncover new opportunities to innovate and serve new markets. And maybe do a little good along the way.
Photo: ASG Bragg meets a returnee in the Walluapuram return area in northern Sri Lanka. Credit: OCHA/W.A.K. Sanjeewa.
Can engineers understand what you say in an encrypted Skype call? Four researchers from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill think so. Andrew White, Austin Matthews, Kevin Snow, and Fabian Monrose presented their paper, Phonotactic Reconstruction of Encrypted VoIP Conversations: Hookt on fon-iks (PDF), yesterday to the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy here in Oakland, California. They show you can find patterns in your encrypted VoIP traffic, match those patterns to sounds of speech, and produce a text transcript of your call. Their “VoIP Conversation Reconstruction Process” looks like this:
Here’s the abstract:
In this work, we unveil new privacy threats against Voice-over-IP (VoIP) communications. Although prior work has shown that the interaction of variable bit-rate codecs and length-preserving stream ciphers leaks information, we show that the threat is more serious than previously thought. In particular, we derive approximate transcripts of encrypted VoIP conversations by segmenting an observed packet stream into subsequences representing individual phonemes and classifying those subsequences by the phonemes they encode. Drawing on insights from the computational linguistics and speech recognition communities, we apply novel techniques for unmasking parts of the conversation. We believe our ability to do so underscores the importance of designing secure (yet efficient) ways to protect the confidentiality of VoIP conversations.
“when the audio is encoded using variable bit rate codecs, the lengths of encrypted VoIP packets can be used to identify the phrases spoken within a call. Our results indicate that a passive observer can identify phrases from a standard speech corpus within encrypted calls with an average accuracy of 50%, and with accuracy greater than 90% for some phrases.”
They suggest preventing this kind of analysis will cut audio fidelity and use more bits.
Don’t panic. Yet. Their work proves the point but the four haven’t created a technology ready for the marketplace. Their research tools only support a few American English dialects, assume favorable conditions for collecting VoIP streams (like finding all your packets on your local area network), and assume the stream uses variable speed encoding. These, along with design for large scale text extraction, are just engineering barriers for the willing, to be overcome with money and talent.
They’ve proven it can be done. So I expect two things to happen. Money and talent will apply this work to private and public sector surveillance. Meanwhile, VoIP services will start making text extraction more difficult.
Beecher Tuttle speculated Skype bought the assets of group text startup 3Jam. Skype’s texting features are… uninspiring? Hiring 3Jam’s Enlai Chu might fix that. Or is it feature creep?
CallByText compromises Skype security, requiring your Skype name and password, setting you up for identity theft. (Thanks, Hudson)
Reuters reports Google and Facebook talked about buying Skype. They didn’t talk to each other, although that would be interesting. Like this is something new? Skype’s corporate affairs folks must talk to potential buyers, if only to understand a non-IPO deal space.
Ubergizmo unboxes the Logitech TV Cam for Skype. “At CES 2011, Skype on TV was a huge hit, particularly among seniors. I’ve never seen so many seemingly retired people at CES, and they were almost all excited by this.”
¶17. (U) Use of New Media: Post is continually searching for ways to expand the reach of our programs using new technologies and social media. We have provided laptops to grantee organizations to loan to exchange participants so they can blog and skype while in the U.S. This year’s Youth Ambassadors blogged about their experience in the US on Globo’s internet site, the number two internet portal in Brazil. The Youth Ambassadors also regularly use MSN, Yahoo groups and Orkut – a social networking site more popular than Facebook in Brazil – to keep in touch with each other and friends. PA has established a Mission "New Technologies" Working Group that will bring together members from across the mission to brainstorm ideas for the best uses of new media to transmit our messages and expand our programming, especially to the young and tech-savvy. Opportunities for New Educational Programs and Challenges to Implementation
Skype is diplomatic kit, like all other social media.
EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn says “companies that stand up for users will do better in the long run if people are informed and can include this information in their decision-making about what services to use.”
Chart showing timeline of effect of North American Level 3/TimeWarnerCable Internet outage on 7 November 2011. 
Jim Courtney
Lord, I don’t want to give this talk. There has to be someone better qualified. But it’s time there was a talk on 20 things we hate about 
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