The Communication Workers of America convened this week, rallying around their legislative agenda. Do you think Skype@Microsoft would be a good organizing target? Live talk is still fleeing to over-the-top services, outside the direct control of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Comcast.
Could CWA find fresh blood at Microsoft’s Skype, Google’s Motorola, Facebook, Aol, Yahoo!, et al? What workplace problems could collective bargaining solve for workers? Can the more white-collar and tech-friendly unions function in and relate to Silicon Valley and Redmond culture, rapid business tempo, labor-ignorant tech media, and free-agent labor markets? Can they adapt to how these organizations are distributed across cities, states, and countries? I think unions inspired to action by Occupy Wall Street demonstrate new life and leadership. They may be ready for the challenge.
If they want in, they should start now. It takes time to learn why those building our new conversational media seek collective power at work.
OPSWAT reported market share of installed Windows instant messenger apps for 2011Q2 (pdf). With Windows Live Messenger at 40.67% and Skype at 27.39%, that would put Microsoft’s post-acquisition share of the desktop side of the market north of 68%. Should this affect the EC’s merger approval? Does this market consolidation justify anti-trust restrictions?
The report is incomplete on a few fronts.
OPSWAT’s data source is specific to Windows desktops. So it leaves out web IM services like Google Talk, Mac clients like iChat, tablet apps like Skype for iPad and mobile IM clients like Skype for Android.
It also wouldn’t register the millions of Facebook chat browser extensions connecting to the Skype network, newly released since the report.
Microsoft’s other IM clients – MSN Messenger and Office Communicator – are not listed at all. Defunct or not reported?
The measurements appear to be biased toward Europe and the Americas since products like Tencent’s QQ, with roughly four times Skype’s active user base, are dramatically undercounted.
Ignore nuance: Just look at that huge block of red. Roughly two out of three IM clients will be Microsoft’s. What does that mean for consumers? To competitors?
Does the desktop IM market still matter? Yes.
Desktop IM has been Skype’s gateway drug for eight years. It was the most straightforward way to bring friends in to your contact list and download the codecs and other software needed for voice and video. Ringing, alerting and other attention-grabbers make realtime desktop apps successful.
That is changing. Standalone desktop IM apps will lose share over the next three years to browser, tablet and mobile apps. HTML5 and WebRTC are becoming real and platform makers are baking live calling into browsers and operating systems.
For now, desktops remain how most people IM most of the time. And Microsoft will soon own that market.
First, the Android software shipping on TELUS’s new LG handset is Skype’s full Android client, not a thin-client. This means high fidelity audio and no wiretap-ready intermediate gateways. This is great.
Aside from coming with Skype pre-installed, what makes the LG Optimus Black a "Skype edition" smartphone? A Skype spokesperson writes: “The Skype edition LG Optimus Black will be the only Skype-branded phone on the Canadian market. It will feature a preloaded Skype icon that connects the user to the Android Market with one touch, where the latest version of Skype for Android can be downloaded. The Skype edition LG Optimus Black also comes complete with an in-box Skype quick-start guide and up to 60 minutes of Skype Credit, so users can begin connecting with the world right away.”
Nicely designed to recruit new users. When will TELUS promote Skype to all its 7 million mobile customers on all its Android phones?
A million people online starts to resemble humanity offline, for good and evil. One hundred million and there’s little difference. During a Skype video call, a Beijing man sees his girlfriend attacked in Toronto, Canada. This crime wasn’t novel; Skype didn’t change what happened. We wouldn’t remark if this happened over the phone; crimes happen with live phone calls hourly. This news story signals world society is almost ready to ignore Skype, for Skype to become wallpaper, just part of ordinary life.
The next big signal? When people start saying they “skype” instead of “Skype.” It happened to Google. Go ahead and google it.
I wrote these slides at one of the very first academic conferences on blogging, 2003’s Blogtalk in Wien. George W. Bush was running for reelection, 9/11 was 18 months ago, and Google had just purchased Blogger. I was just having fun but, looking back, my point was social media and society were resembling each other, changing each other, and that it would be surprising, horrifying, and very human. None of the slide’s scenarios were real that Spring. Yet so many came true in the blogosphere and the social media channels that followed.
Fonolo lets customer contact systems say, “don’t hold; we’ll call you with a live operator.” It’s a lovely mashup of VoIP, web, and customer-centered workflow. Try it out on Sirius Satellite Radio’s contact page; the widget’s on the right.
Automatically route these alerts to third-party services I choose. Companies can offer alternatives to my operator’s gouging. Maybe prepaid SIM cards at a location near me. Over-the-top Wi-Fi telephony like Truphone or Skype. Customer advocacy services. Class action lawsuit lawyers. Your choice.
The technology is easy. Pubsubhubbub. Or even email. Just structure the data and make it easy for consumers to opt-in/out, and select your watchdog service.
Does the FCC and Congress want America to benefit from competition? Inform telecom customers and fuel a vigorous market at the moment of pain.
My family crossed the border for dim sum last week. From Ferndale, Washington, to Delta, British Columbia, a half-hour drive, my iPhone’s Maps app pulled 8 MB of photos and location data. My international roaming fees for the two hours were about $20.
Private lesson; live on the Skype video conferencing service. Intended for intermediate to advanced acoustic guitar players
Cost: $75 for one hour lesson ($ in US or CAN)
Requirements:
Skype application (available for free on skype.com); High-speed internet connection; Web-cam & Microphone and headphones; A Paypal account; Guitar
The lessons:
I’ll be teaching parts of my songs, exercises, technique, tricks, extended techniques, open tunings, interpretation, textures and how to incorporate all that in an original composition and answer any question regarding my guitar playing or gear, etc.
Skype earned market acceptance when Oprah said "I love Skype" in 2008. Skype started to become a household name as Oprah brought guests to her her weekday show.
Thursday, a year later, she spent an hour in Skype’s honor. Nothing happened; Skype’s download rate didn’t budge.
The "Where the Skype Are You?" show aired Thursday, 05/21/09, at 4:00 pm in most US and Canada markets, rolling across time zones. U.S. Memorial Day weekend might have dampened the "Oprah Effect." A few weeks’ earlier, the Oprah Winfrey Show had a Nielsen Television rating of 5.4, 6,197,000 audience, and 7,110,000 viewers for the week of 04/27 – 05/03 2009.
Why didn’t Oprah’s Skype day work?
The small problem: The tone was wrong. It felt like an infomercial more than a celebration of broadband Internet’s ubiquity. Oprah’s delivery was wooden, the Skype conversations banal, video quality variable.
This episode must have looked great on paper. Skype reinforces several Oprah themes: Surviving tough economic times by using free or cheaper tools. The importance of family and communication. That we live in a connected world and affect each other.
Sadly, Oprah’s regulars already knew the Skype basics, having seen dozens of guest appearances over Skype. Skype day became a "best of" show; not the most exciting format.
The huge problem: Fans could not Skype Oprah.Unlike twitter, where Oprah created an account that everyone could follow and message, Oprah did not give out a Skype account for fans to befriend. People want to be closer to their celebrities so, for example, they followed Oprah on twitter; 1,182,301 at last count.
Why couldn’t a million fans Skype Oprah?
Twitter scales well for their news and celebrity users (ones with high TV ratings). Fame changes relationships from symmetrical (we friend each other) to off the charts. 1,182,301 twitterers follow Oprah, Oprah follows 14.
Could Skype handle an Oprah account? Or a Coke, a White House, or an American Idol account? What would happen if someone with a fan base used the web and television to invite a million people to befriend them in Skype? No PSTN, just in-network Skype activity. One user with a million friends.
Skype is engineered for the average user, with a handful of contacts and modest levels of activity. For the most part, Skype’s network is thin, flat, like the long tail in a power curve.
Power skypers, like Skype Journal readers and those who work at Skype or who use Skype for selling, may have a few hundred or a few thousand contacts.
Stressors come to mind:
Approval work flow. Can you imagine opening up your Skype client in the morning to approve a hundred new contacts? You might get through 100 in 15 minutes if you click ‘add to contacts’ blindly. 1000 per day at 6 seconds each? Almost two hours. A million? 1,666 hours, about nine months. For all practical purposes, this must be automated.
Client Account Storage. Can your Skype client hold a million contacts? No. Even if it was the only software running and you had all the memory in the world, your Skype client was never built to hold that large a contact list. While some enterprises have hundreds of thousands of employees and and millions of stakeholders, Skype for Windows or Mac will slow to a crawl and crash when loading that many contacts. Let’s say each new contact’s profile, avatar, and history uses .1 MB. The contact list alone would be 100k MB. Skype still thinks like a phone or mobile phone company, not like a social network.
Presence and Activity Streams. Skype updates your friends when you log on, log off, or otherwise change your presence. A Skype client would be very busy with hundreds of thousands of mood and availability updates. Presence data might be very useful to the celebrity if you want to narrowcast updates ("today’s show is about puppies") only to people who are online; no need for you to see the message when you log in next week.
Navigation. Skype’s UI is not designed to let search, sort, browse, discover, organize a million contacts. Not even ten thousand contacts.
Filtering contact activity. If you friend them, they will IM, call, and send you files. I sometimes have a dozen public chats and private conversations going at once; dizzying. What happens when ten thousand people try to chat with you during today’s financial conference call? You must automate your responses in ways that produce meaningful experiences and that route callers to relevant people and services.
Public vs. shades of private. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman revealed a deep flaw in Skype’s identity system. Her MegAtWork Skype account was different than her personal account, and she could only log in to one at a time. Techniques vary, but a celebrity must be able to manage personal, family, workplace, acquaintances, and fans from one login, disclosing only as appropriate.
Swamping Skype supernodes and relays. What happens when one node on the Skype network connects with five to ten percent of the whole network? Can enough supernodes emerge in Chicago for Oprah, for example, to support all the new connections, updates and conversations? Will this hurt the experience of other Skype users in Chicagoland? How much of updating is done directly between a Skype client and Skype’s presence and client-backup servers? Can that client-server connection be swamped as the volume rises four to five orders of magnitude over the norm?
No server side messaging, voice, video APIs. No software developer in their right mind wants to build and operate their own IM gateway. Think thousands of Skype clients running on hundreds of boxes, each needing careful administration. Instead they want to talk to a web service API. Services like IMified (congratulations, Voxeo!) let you design and run bots for the AIM, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google networks in hours, and without your getting into the gateway business. Skype isn’t on the list because it doesn’t host a public web service interface to the Skype network.
Why would Oprah want a million Skype fans?
Why would a brand or celebrity want to have a Skype relationship with so many people? For companies on Cluetrain 1.0 (markets are conversations) and moving to Cluetrain 2.0 (markets are relationships), Skype offers opportunities for engagement and intimacy. Unlike blogs or services like twitter, Skype conversations are held privately.
How will Oprahs engage?
Broadcast alerts and information. IM news relevant to fans based on language, interests, location, and length of relationship.
Deliver services. You could sign up for Oprah’s book club, update Oprah’s magazine subscriptions, get the link for the episode you missed, get local show times for next week, or suggest a show topic. Harpo Productions could support those services through a blend of voice mashups and call centers. How about Skyping an Oprah account that played a Skype video of her last show, or a show on demand?
Bring fans together. Introduce fans with similar interests to each other. Host thousands of small salons in Skype public chats before or after a show, or about a theme or a magazine topic. Help the millions find others to solve problems, share burdens, and make sense of the world.
"Millionaire has teamed up with Skype for "Ask The Expert," one of our most fun and innovative lifelines!"
From an August 2008 ABC press release: "Contestants are invited to ask an expert’s advice on any question beyond the $1,000 level. Experts appear via a live face-to-face Skype video call and will include newsmakers, journalists, former "Millionaire" contestants, politicians, doctors, professors and trivia champs, among others. Bill Nye appears during the show’s first week, airing September 8-12, and Ogi Ogas, a former "Millionaire" contestant who won $500,000, appears during week two, airing September 15-19."
This version of Millionaire is in syndication in the US. It hasn’t made Nielsen’s top-twenty-most-popular-syndicated-shows lately, but it is seen by millions of households every week.
Experts Skype in to the television studio. In this clip, Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, calls in from Pleasantville, New York.
See the little white mark in the upper left corner? He’s using Skype’s High Quality (640×480@30fps) video.
The expert is shown on a large screen in the studio, exposing him to the in-studio experience and letting the contestant get a feel for how much to trust the expert with a lifeline.
When called on, the expert and the contestant talk to each other and the production team shows them side-by-side to the audience. The expert’s reactions to being right, wrong, or not knowing add to the drama.
On the web side of the business, this is the Millionaire home page. See the Skype artwork (bottom middle with the rainbow)?
The Skype badge takes you to the "Ask an Expert" landing page. It encourages you to download Skype. "It’s free, easy and quick to get on Skype so check out all the great information below on how you can use Skype to connect with family and friends!"
If I ever had any doubt about the value of Twitter as a commercial social networking tool, it evaporated this weekend as a result of following some Tweets on the subject of smartphones that appeared this weekend. They certainly provide an independent perspective on issues that I’m sure others are wondering about:
Luca Filigheddu has just gone through the process of evaluating the BlackBerry Bold and iPhone over the past few weeks. Saturday he sent me a Twitter direct message to say that he had acquired a BlackBerry Bold; after he had had a few hours experience Saturday I see this on his Twitter feed:And when I came home yesterday evening I see that my acquaintance Olivier Chaine has put up this Tweet (earlier yesterday I had suggested, in response to his request for smartphone Twitter client recommendations, that he look at Slandr.Net as a mobile platform Twitter client):
First I would suggest that the mini-computer industry died many years ago, to be replaced by the microcomputer era, especially server banks. Trust me, I spent a major part of my career relying on mini-computers. I think I would need a backpack to be mobile with a mini-computer.
So I’ll assume Mark is really looking to have a mobile microcomputer or PC experience on a smartphone. Having had several months’ experience with both an iPhone and a BlackBerry Bold, here are my criteria for a mobile microcomputer or, more aptly, a “Laptop for the Hip or Purse”:
Minimum 480 x 320 graphics display.
Full QWERTY keyboard.
Web browser capable of supporting PC-type browsing.
Supports “Cut & Paste” (of significant value more often than one would initially imagine until it’s not available)
View and edit MS Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) with potential to add document creation.
Supports video recording and MMS
Background processing (especially after experiencing both Truphone for BlackBerry and Truphone for iPhone)
Supports true Instant Messaging in background while running other applications
Equipped for memory upgrades through a removable memory card.
Supports both Both WiFi and 3G wireless protocols
A great set of specifications but the key question here is: “How does it change the user experience?”. In particular does it eliminate the “urge” to turn on, or always carry, a laptop to keep up-to-date with real time activities?
As I have mentioned elsewhere, after a month’s experience with the BlackBerry Bold, I found I had lost that tugging “urge” to turn on my laptop for keeping current with real time (and often mission critical) information. This change did not just involve email and web browsing but also Instant Messaging, Twitter and attached document editing.. RIM would do well to position Bold as a “Laptop for the Hip or Purse”, bypassing all the technical comparisons and moving on to succinctly promoting Bold based on the actual user experience.
I like my iPhone for many of its personal information delivery features; it gives me a feel for what is appealing about the iPhone. I can find Toronto Transit streetcar times, do unit conversions, find the nearest Tim Horton’s or Starbucks; it has lots of great information delivery features. On the media side it’s definitely an extension of the iPod although it does not have the full audio performance of the Bold.
However, a mobile microcomputer the iPhone is NOT! Yes it uses a modified Mac OS; it uses Safari browser; it has an iPod variant.
However, I find myself turning to my Bold much more often than my iPhone for real two way interactivity. Just as important as the keyboard is the ability to track instant messaging sessions, whether on iSkoot (for Skype chat), Palringo or BlackBerry Messenger in background while carrying out other activities. On the subject of low cost international calling I find I can make much more use of Truphone for BlackBerry than Truphone for iPhone (that’s the subject of a future post).
I am encountering more and more acquaintances who have no use for a touch keyboard; certainly my typing error rate is much worse on the iPhone. For this reason alone I consider the iPhone to be a very good one-way information delivery device whereas BlackBerry is a true two-way communications device.
As for applications, suffice it to say that over the next six months, where feasible, business savvy developers will publish applications running on both devices. For instance, The Hockey News has just released mobile applications for both the BlackBerry and iPhone. I mentioned Truphone above; Mobile Google apps are another example.
Keeping up with iTunes music via BlackBerry MediaSync is a trivial operation. Frankly from some video and audio streaming experiences I have had, BlackBerry Bold provides superior stereo audio performance even without earbuds or a headset.
Bottom line: when I leave my home office or hotel room with my Bold, I no longer have to take my laptop to keep current.
Yes, at the moment, the iPhone browser a superior user experience but rest assured RIM is not ignoring the issue. At this point the Bold’s browser issues have sometimes been frustrating but they not been an inhibition to my browsing activities in any major way – I still get the information I am seeking. The critical parameter here is the 480 pixel display width, which is sufficient to view most websites and weblogs without the need for horizontal scrolling via a ribbon bar. When RIM releases carrier-specific versions of their upgraded operating system – including browser enhancements, the Bold will live up to its full potential as “A Laptop for the Hip or Purse”.
(As for pricing on Rogers, both the Bold and iPhone are C$199 with a three year contract.)
In future posts I’ll cover in more detail some of the issues mentioned above, including my Truphone evaluation on each device, some very amazing real time video and audio experiences, the range of third party applications available on each device and why both background processing and WiFi is becoming critical to any smartphone.
And, Mark, if you’re looking for a mobile microcomputer, I would suggest serious consideration of the BlackBerry Bold. As a final determinant, have a look at the Bold’s display – it’s been universally acclaimed as “stunning”; I can only agree.
In closing, can we expect Skype to include BlackBerry as one of their supported platforms for Skype for Mobile? Or will iSkoot improve on their user interface to take advantage of some new BlackBerry developer tools? (Most Skype executives I meet are sporting a BlackBerry – it’s supported by eBay IT.)
Update: Luca published a post this afternoon, A Bold New Experience, and asks about his Tweet above: “Why Did I Say That?”
1) Always on Experience: the BB is offering me a realtime always-on experience never found in any device I used before 2) Multitasking – It lets you receive IMs while writing an email or making a phone call, for example 3) Stunning display 4) Wide availability of apps 5) Crazy speed 6) Great usability
But, as a Skype Journal reader, you can save even more. If you enter the promotional code “skypejournal”, you’ll get a 20% discount, taking that Super Early Bird price down to $952.
Also note that eComm has arranged special conference group rates at the San Francisco Airport Marriott, available until February 8, 2009; note that, as has been my own experience at Marriott hotels for several years, all rooms have high speed Internet access included in the room rate.
An excellent deal for anyone who is interested in learning about developments in the rapidly evolving Emerging Communications space where Alec Saunders Voice 2.0 Manifesto is now turning into reality.
When I started using Skype more intensively about three years ago, I had been a heavy user of Microsoft’s MSN Messenger for several years. But about 18 months ago, I stopped logging into MSN Messenger; none of my contacts were there – or, if they were, they were also on Skype. As for GTalk, well I added a couple of contacts two weeks ago to test out GMail’s new voice and video chat feature, so now I’m up to ten contacts on GTalk – and they are also all on Skype. One person still persists in trying to reach me on GTalk these days … and my BlackBerry catches that – in background. But when long time acquaintance, well respected blogger and former Microsoft employee Alec Saunders puts up a tweet as shown above, it has to be the ultimate complement to Skype’s pervasive worldwide presence. When you have 370 million accounts (yes, I know there are only 30 to 50 million using Skype over the course of a month), one would suspect that market presence and user base size wins out over any technical disadvantage, such as the lack of XMPP compliance. Sort of places XMPP right up there with SIP – an excellent protocol for interop but it’s sort of like the tree falling in the forest – who hears it -at the end user level? And, both SIP and XMPP require business agreements between the linking service providers covering every connection, whether there’s revenue or not. In the IM world, it’s a matter of who’s available for a conversation? Which service has the highest probability of being able to determine a contact’s availability and start a chat, voice call, share a file, send an SMS message or even do a (High Quality) video call? Which service has eight ways of seamlessly carrying out a file transfer? Alec’s one problem in keeping current? He’ll have to go back to his BlackBerry to receive Skype IM messages via iSkoot. BlackBerry’s background processing capability becomes a very distinct advantage here in the smartphone market. When attending an event in downtown Toronto last night I received an important “good news” Skype chat message on my BlackBerry Bold, while looking up a website the speaker was referencing and following the Twitter feed of one of the organizers. A more significant challenge for Skype is to generate the marketing that will attract all those of a younger generation (such as my daughter) whose “social networks” are immersed into MSN Messenger as their IM client. In closing have a look at some of Alec’s followup Tweets: In closing I should also mention that I like to use BlackBerry Messenger for its ability to bypass the Internet for messages that “just have to get there now!” via BlackBerry’s unique method for PIN messaging. Update: An oversight on my part: of course Skype IM also has the hooks to allow Skype chat sessions to proxy for other services. For a classic example check out Twitter4Skype. Full disclosure: Alec Saunders is author of the Voice 2.0 Manifesto, which is proving itself out in today’s dynamic mashup environment – especially when it comes to Communications Enhanced Business Processes. He is CEO of iotum, whose Calliflower Conference Call service is currently being launched. And, much earlier in his career, he was DOS product manger at Microsoft Canada at a time when DOS’s memory management feature tried to compete with Quarterdeck’s QEMM and the author managed Quarterdeck Canada.
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