My top 15 for 2011.
15. Skype for iOS reboot. Launch and connect fast. Go back to basics and invent a tactile, visual experience. Pursue delight.
14. Skype for Metro. Miró me, baby.
13. Scriptable desktop and mobile clients. I want a bot API.
12. A social graph API for better integration with social networks and web services of all sizes and degrees of privacy. The world isn’t just MySpacebookIn.
11. Better people-search. Find the John Smith in a given city or who knows me on LinkedIn or who tweets about movies.
10. Skype cloud services. Hosting for developers.
9. LDAP client service, the better to have company directories inside my Skype clients.
8. Skype interop with WebRTC/RTCweb so off-the-shelf web browsers can make and receive Skype calls.
7. Free group video for three people. Build the habit.
6. Better whiteboarding than GoToMeeting. Especially on tablets.
5. A calendaring and scheduling API. Invite people to a Skype meeting, and launch them into it at the right time.
4. Formal launch of a “hangouts” feature.
3. Unleash developer terms of service. Freedom to deploy your Skype-inside apps on servers, to serve businesses, and reach the Chinese market. Freedom from Apple-like app pre-approval by Microsoft employees.
2. China User Transparency. Skype for desktops are delivered with censorware and who-knows-what-else to users in China and Hong Kong. Help me know who to trust. Show me which client they are using (safe, subject to lawful interception, and/or poisoned at the client), how their communication first enters the Skype network (a Skype desktop client, a server gateway, a SkypeKit app), jurisdictions where my conversation is routed (by country), and the physical location of the other parties (subject to their privacy preferences). Help us trust the Skype network at least as much as we trust governments and the Internet.
1. Digital Identity reboot. Skype’s identity systems are stuck in 1995. The world and our lives are more complex. Without a serious rethink, Skype will lose out on partnerships, Microsoft integration, enterprise integration and millions of users. On that roadmap, if you choose to accept it: Multiple profiles per account. Multiple forms of authentication. Permissions and relationships by profile. Shared profiles (roles). Transferable profiles. ToS by role. Sign in with Skype. I’d be pleased to introduce you to the world’s identity practice leaders at the next Internet Identity Workshop this Spring.
Bonus points:
Skype for Kinect. Gestural interface, baby. Bonus points for multilingual fingerspelling.
Emergency Dialing. Save lives, please.
 Phil Wolff builds realtime collaboration products for effective people. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.
Flipboard shows user experience innovation brings joy and utility to content. Frédéric Filloux explains the strategic import of Flipboard’s disintermediation of publishers and other aggregators. But their power starts with a simple before and after:
Google Reader on the left becomes Flipboard(Google Reader) on the right. It uses visual mass to show the relative weights of stories. It uses white space, typography, and page layout to offer simple choices. Flipboarders fluidly swing between stories and the stream. We can dive deep; we easily shift from “lean back” news snacks to “lean forward” news curation and sharing.
Skypelandia is holding our collective breath, waiting for hundreds of UI experiments based on SkypeKit. Some of us whine over Skype for Mac, but that’s just a symptom. We’re desperate.
We’ve seen Skype wrestle one IM app (with voice and video bolted on) onto many devices (mobile, desktop, television), modes (text, audio, video), and platforms (Mac, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android). Now we need something qualitatively different.
Hundreds of millions of Skype users need a reinvigorated experience. An experience that brings to the fore the tasks we perform, the relationships we cultivate, our contexts and plans for conversation, and conversations themselves. An experience that adjusts as we shift from “lean back” social surveillance to “lean forward” discourse, group forming, decision making, and leadership. Skype can free itself to innovate its core concepts, and set user interfaces free to follow new functions.
So much has been learned from mobility, multitouch surfaces, artificial reality (and virtual worlds, AR’s inverse), and the social sciences. Now, while Skype’s blood is hot, now is the time to experiment. Now is a time to imagine a new soul for Skype. New paths to give users mastery and accomplishment. New reasons for Skype to be loved for the joys brought to daily life.
Skype’s 8th birthday is this summer. Eight years is forever in web years. You make Skype’s plumbing work seamlessly at scale. Upon that foundation, pursue art. Give our global chorus, our humanity, full flight.
Art. Beauty. Grace. Fit. Elegance.
Please.
 Lukas Mathis says the new Skype for Mac is too complicated for casual users and not flexible enough for advanced users. His head is blogging what his heart knows: revulsion and alienation over the experience.
Skype’s Mac forum has been full of kvetching, frustration and despair. Alexia Tsotsis’ TechCrunch thread concurs, after Alexia threw in a sweet mockup for contrast. Designers (Davide Casali, Free Reyes, Iiro Jäppinen, Vasjen Katro, Florian Pichler, Pritthish Chakraborty, James Scott, Craig Philips) are tweaking Photoshopped concept art, yearning for a better Skype for Mac.
How did this happen?
Over on Quora, Hugo Ahlberg points to UX team 80/20 Group’s contribution to the new design. From their site:
Millions of people use Skype to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files. 80/20 worked with Skype to transform the user experience of its products, starting with the popular Mac client.
OVERVIEW
Skype’s Mac application was beginning to show its age as it packed in an ever-growing number of features. As a result, users were having a difficult time understanding and using the full breadth of its capabilities. Additionally, Skype saw the need to consolidate its product development efforts and drive user experience consistency across platforms. 80/20 worked with Skype on a ground-up redesign of its Mac client, which would set the stage for unification across its product lineup.
So the brief was to fix feature bloat, leaving room for future bloat. Oh, and to save on programming time by having one body of code/design.
SOLUTION
User testing and audits of the Mac client highlighted issues with window management, contact management and revealed that features didn’t have enough real estate to be articulated effectively. The new single-window design improves work flows between calling and messaging while supporting the common behavior of using the “call log” to initiate communication.
The cramped design didn’t offer enough screen space for all those features.
RESULT
The next-generation user experience for Skype Mac increases use of core features while providing a clean slate for growth. The success of the redesign is seen not only in the Mac client itself but in the design’s ability scale to touch-screen devices and beyond.
So:
- More pixels per feature.
- No features subtracted.
- One-window to hold everything.
- And a happy client.
Design is hard.
Harder still when you strive to run on every operating system, in every device, with all your features. You want to be true to the nuances that make a Mac app feel like it is native to the Mac. To Android like it was born there.
Yet those many flavors slow Skype’s time-to-market.
How do you hold fast to your core Skypiness, to what made people love you, and support new features for new markets, new use cases, new business models? Your backlogs overflow. The pressure is intense. Heck, I add to my Skype wishlist daily so I can only imagine what your iceboxes look like.
The tension between simple and power is killing you.
I know this. You know this. Everyone at Skype knows this.
The shrieks from Apple users? That’s the anguish of the stricken, losing their love for the Mac-like spare brilliance of their beloved 2.8 client. They forget they’ve been calling for feature and release parity with Windows users for years. Skype gave in to feature creep and bought in to a universal design for desktops, perhaps for tablets and mobiles too.
So here we are.
Seething.
Hoping.
Please see this moment as opportunity. 
Take bold risks. Forget our gripes and take us someplace new in a way we hadn’t imagined that makes our hearts swell with pride.
Believe today’s minimalism pays later. You want a diverse developer ecosystem, yes? All those use cases cluttering your inbox? Leave those to third-parties. Let them build upon your ruthless simplicity.
Reconsider fundamental assumptions of what it means to Skype, to be Skype, to belong to Skype, to play Skype, to have Skype. The last seven years are merely prelude.
photo credits: cc-by siddharth vishwanathan (pic), Alberto Ortiz (pic).
My hopes were raised when I heard you can tweet within Skype by using the mouse menu on a contact or an IM message. It turns out Tweetie was using a MacOS feature to offer its services inside other applications. So you can tweet from inside browsers, IRC apps, email, etc.
I should find Skype as an option in all my other apps. A control-click in Office, in Tweetie, in Photoshop, in Outlook, even in Gmail, should offer a Skype feature.
First there is bringing other things into Skype…
- If it can be resolved as text, let me IM it.
- If it can be resolved as a contact, let me add it to my Skype contacts, talk with it, or schedule a Skype talk in my calendar.
- If it can be resolved as a file (even a reference to a file), let me transfer it in Skype.
And so on. These will look like: Add this contact to Skype or Skype this contact. Send this picture, file, video to a Skype contact. Send this iCalendar event to a Skype contact.
Then there is bringing Skype things and services into other applications…
- Add my Skype profile as a signature in this email.
- Address this email to a Skype contact.
- Add your Skype conference room details to this calendar event.
- Show your Skype history with this Facebook (hcard) contact.
- Crop this photo to Skype avatar size.
In the spirit of “Skype everywhere,” bring Skypie goodness into all my apps.
This may be a Mac-first or even a Mac-only feature. But it feels like this could be a high payoff for low effort.
Screenshot: Jim Courtney
 Do you have 100 employees using Skype at one location?
Worried you won’t have enough Skype supernodes to go around?
Worry no more! Now you can buy the Reef9 Node Master for only $495. Just plug it in outside your firewall and watch it go. It will spin up dozens of Skype supernodes. Near your users and always on, so you always have the best access to the Skype network money can buy for just pennies a day. For an extra $45 per year, Reef9 will update your Skype clients with the latest in Skype P2P technology.
It’s fiction, at the moment.
But not unreasonable.
It’s the kind of solution SkypeKit was made for.
More from Skype Journal on the outage:
If you’re interested in putting together a business plan for the Reef9 Node Master, chat with me on Skype (when it’s back up for you). Call me at +1-510-343-5664 (Google Voice), follow on twitter @SkypeJournal (just the posts) and @evanwolf (everything). Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats, where we’re talking about this right now.
“Respondents needed an average of 4-3/4 hours per week to arrange nine meetings with seven parties involved. Almost a quarter of workers needed seven or more hours per week to coordinate their appointments. Before a single participant was sitting in a conference room, initiators had spent over half an hour arranging the meeting.”
LMRMC report of a September survey of white collar workers in the US, Germany and France.
More than one in ten hours is spent scheduling.
1 in 4 workers spend about a whole day out of their week scheduling. 20% of the week!
Do you know anyone who is thrilled by juggling calendars? I don’t.
So what can Skype do before anyone even calls or chats?
Let’s imagine Skype offered a “Future Conversations” tab and a “+” button on that tab.
Skype Journal mockup of left tab in Skype for Windows 6.x with "Future" tab and "Conversation Requests" section.
You will have seven paths through the Add a Future Conversation wizard.
- A simple event reminder. Skype would remind you, with all your open clients, of your next meeting. You might type this in or pick it from your Outlook, Exchange or web based calendar.
- An invitation service. Think Evite. Invite people you know to a conversation at a time you specify. The folks need not be in your Skype contact list; perhaps you look them up in your Gmail or Facebook contacts. Send invitations, get RSVPs.
- A scheduling service. It helps you negotiate the best times and places to talk. This might be through guided conversation (“I’m free Wednesday afternoon. How about you?”) or automation (“According to your calendars, the next three available times are…”).
- An expectations setter. The host and attendees can type their meeting goals, agenda items, and deliverables in advance. One of those things that makes for better meetings.
- A cross-poster. One event, shown everywhere I need it. Private calendaring software like Microsoft Outlook on the desktop or Microsoft Exchange on the intranet. Hosted calendars like Google Calendar and Yahoo! Calendar. Public listings like Plancast, Upcoming, Meetup and Facebook. Mobile calendars like those that come with RIM, iPhone and Android and many Symbian phones.
- A parachute. Before the meeting, offer the attendees a chance to opt out and send their regrets. Better to have people who really need to be in a meeting than those who just lurk or waste time.
- A hard start. A minute before the scheduled time, the Skype client of the call’s anchor automatically calls everyone so you start talking on time.
All of this is easy for engineers to build. Would people use it?
Can Skype switch people from their current scheduling tools (desktop calendars, email, phone, and online calendars) to a new one in the Skype client or on Skype.com?
Few people do their scheduling using online tools dedicated to the task.
Better scheduling cuts friction from collaboration. A Skype tool would have to be easier, more convenient and lead more naturally into appointments than existing alternatives.
Can Skype save millions of people a whole month of work every year by adding scheduling features?
I hope so.
Skype’s founding purpose is to help people talk. Getting them to talk at the same time is a great step.
Want to schedule some time to talk about hiring me for collaboration product management? Chat with me on Skype. Call me at +1-510-316-9773, follow on twitter @SkypeJournal (just the posts) and @evanwolf (everything). Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
This 2008 presentation was pretty great, so I’m sharing it. It focuses on four themes: The future of work is:
- transparent (your boss will know everything you do and how well you do it),
- flat (remote work and physically decentralized organizations),
- competitive (global labor market, pay for performance, easy/cheap access to higher education), and
- on demand (free agency, project culture).
It happily concludes employers get to cherry pick from a global workforce and the best workers get more control over their work.
I’m struck by the dark side of this vision. Virtualized labor markets like oDesk and vWork are long tail beasts. Like actors in Hollywood or Bollywood, most free agents are underemployed, underpaid and miscast, struggling in a cutthroat sea of Labor Market Optimizing Task Seekers. Transparency brings the scrutiny of call centers to creative professions, corporate big brother at its most invasive. First world talent is at a pricing disadvantage for generations.
Elsewhere:
If you find a collaboration product innovation gig that pays more than beer, Skype me, call me at +1-510-343-5664, follow @SkypeJournal and @evanwolf. Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
I’ve been using Julian Bond’s free Twype Windows app for years to pipe my latest tweet into my Skype mood. Update once, see my thoughts everywhere.
But the more I use FourSquare, Gowalla and Meetup mobile apps and play around with Facebook Places and Google Latitude, check-in services seem closer in spirit to how people use Skype mood messages. Check-ins signal where I am to my contacts. Check-ins share places I think are interesting to my friends and colleagues. Check-ins let you know I’m travelling or out of the office for the day.
So, Footfeed, how about piping check-ins to Skype moods?
Check in with me any time. Skype me, call me at +1-510-343-5664, follow @evanwolf and @SkypeJournal. Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Aol and Facebook seem to be launching new (Gizmodo: Why You’ll Give Up Gmail for Facebook Mail) and refreshed (TechCrunch: Aol To Unveil New Aol Mail On Sunday) free email services this week. Why not Skype? Mail would be a great line extension.
For existing customers:
- One inbox for directed email, voicemail, video mail, IM chats, mailing lists.
- Start live talk from an email.
- Start an email from live talk.
- A more complete picture of your relationships.
- Smoother modality shifts during a conversation or a relationship:
- from short form (texting) to longer messages (email)
- from abstract (mood, presence, text) to intimate (video)
- from personal (one-to-one) to large group (listservs, conference calls)
- More access to alerts, invitations and other conversational triggers.
There’s some prior art if you’re looking for use cases. Netralia’s Skylook for Outlook (free trial) pioneered this in 2006 for people who spend their days in Microsoft Outlook. Skylook let you:
Full Story »
Skype has shown in-app tips and adverts for years.  One of the newest campaigns promotes "One tool to manage Skype for everyone in your business – trial Skype Manager now." No word on where this campaign is being seen or how long it will last.
Skype Manager is Skype’s console for managing corporate Skype names (like "AcmeSales"), employee Skype names, distributing Skype credits to employees, and seeing activity reports.
Skype Manager tests a few large assumptions:
- People only belong to one organization.
- People are willing to turn off their personal Skype accounts when at work. And vice versa. Skype Manager requires the use of special Skype names that fall under Skype’s business terms of service and Skype’s business end user license agreement. Your personal or previous Skype name won’t work in Skype Manager, either as an employee or as a manager.
- The Corporation is the organizational unit that controls Skype at work. Skype Manager assumes a hierarchical organization structure.
People Really Polyaffiliate.
People affiliate with many "employers" and have professional networks that span many organizations. Skype Manager assumes a radically simplified, unrealistic organizational structure.
Andy Abramson is a great example of someone who should have difficulty with Skype Manager. He has his own corporate communications firm (Comunicano) with more than 20 employees. He is marketing chief for In Store Solutions, Skype’s online store and consumer electronics partner. He has a sideline as a wine columnist so he’s part of a several newspapers’ list of contributors. Skype Manager has no way of letting him manage or be part of more than one organization.
Today’s workforce is more ad hoc, just in time, and project oriented than ever. The emergent organizational structures cross the corporate financial and legal boundaries Manager tries to force on Skype users. A leader should be able to use Skype manager across corporate lines, including suppliers, customers and partners. A person should be able to use Skype manager for their multiple garage startups, even if they are not yet "registered" with the government.
At best, Skype Manager ignores how people really work together, aligned by interests, goals, and capabilities more than an org chart prepared by the human resources department or a cost center list administered by the finance department.
At worst, Skype Manager disrupts their wirearchical organization, limiting teams to one company’s hierarchy, and raising a barrier to effective group formation, goal setting, communication, collaboration, and coordination.
That’s part of the problem. Next,
Skype Manager Forces Work/Life Imbalance.
photo by Simply CVR
Skype’s clients and the Skype Manager business account incorrectly assume a person’s work life and personal life are distinct. From 8 to 5 (or less if you are in France) you and your time are property of your employer. That you leave your life, your relationships, and your responsibilities at home.
That rarely happens, especially in Skype’s market of knowledge workers. There’s a reason companies operate day care centers. There’s a reason labor unions fought for personal breaks. There’s a reason why surgeons in an operating room can be interrupted to take emergency calls from their family.
Companies, and most industrialized societies, know the employment contract is not absolute. Knowing your children made it home safely from school doesn’t hurt your job performance. Scheduling a dental appointment, coordinating grocery shopping after work, saying I Love You doesn’t keep you from working.
In some strange places, like Palo Alto and Tallinn, people are known to work 60, 70, 100 hours per week. Companies long ago agreed to let us do "on company time" some of things we used to do "on our own time" in exchange for those extra hours.
Skype Manager forces you to have a separate Skype account if you’re going to use Skype for work.
Skype Manager expects you to log out of your main Skype account, the one by which the world knows you, the one with your contacts and the history of your relationships.
And then sign in to an account provided by your company.
This is bizarre. Skype just spent seven years convincing people to bring in their lovers, friends and families, to use Skype at work and bring their colleagues into Skype, to use Skype at school and bring their classmates and teachers into Skype.
Skype Manager says hang up on your contacts. Be unreachable. Play dead. Destroy your investment in your social graph. Burn your social capital. Commit social suicide.
This will cause people to abandon Skype as their primary (or secondary) communication channel.
Don’t believe me? A simple test: for one week, don’t use your personal mobile phone, email, twitter, facebook, or Skype accounts while at work. Let’s see how long you last.
Over a career, you will have many jobs, many employers, play many roles. You learn your relationships, your conversations, and your reputation are assets that last long after you leave a job. Skype Manager hurts the worker.
Prescription 1: Stop Listening To The Wrong People
A classic design principle: don’t confuse the customer (the person who pays) with the user (the person who actually uses your product). Skype for Business supports the customer at the user’s expense.
Skype’s Enterprise business unit has been listening to corporate gatekeepers more than workplace users. IT and telecom staff that prize control over communication. Compliance and legal officers that avoid risk instead of enabling collaboration.
That’s fine. They’ve had their say, paved the way, done their damage.
Now listen to the people who will actually use your product. Find the pioneering champions, the matrixed teams that live on Skype. See what Skype can do to help them find talent, to be better at discovering the people they need to talk with, to stay in touch keeping relationships vital and trusted, to talk more and more often, to talk more purposefully, to move easily from talk to action. They use tools to fill in Skype’s conceptual and feature gaps. Learn from this.
Another design principle, "you are not the user," led Skype to design for newbies and occasional users. So talk with collaborators, with highly productive and horribly unproductive teams, with teams that never form, with teams that form and fail. It is time to design for how people Get Things Done Together. That will be the key to Skype’s success in the workplace.
Here’s a draft research agenda I prepared last year: Skype Journal – Research Topics in Collaboration and its overview blog post. If I had my dream job at Skype, it would be solving these problems.
Prescription 2: Remodel Skype’s Identity System Around People
Skype is stuck with an early 1990s IM model of digital identity. The world’s top experts in this field will be Mountain View (ten minutes from the Palo Alto campus) next week for the Internet Identity Workshop unconference. Talk with the technologists who invented OpenID, OAuth, VRM and ActivityStreams at companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace, Orange, and industries like banking, security, telecom, and defense. Ask what sucks about Skype’s identity model. They’ll tell you.
Off the cuff:
- Skype says a person cannot sign more than one Skype EULA/TOS.
- Skype says a person cannot handle multiple identities from one ID.
- Skype says a person’s identity and social graph do not belong to them.
There are much better ways. One ID, many identities. One ID, many contracts. And more.
Figure it out before you alienate your whole userbase.
Prescription 3: Rename the unit from Skype for Business to Skype for Work.
People work for a paycheck. We also work to advance ourselves, plan weddings, and run for elected office. Make tools that put people at the center of work. And brand yourselves accordingly. Skype for Work: Get Things Done Together.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote in “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” that strong ties and hierarchical organization power revolutions. Biz Stone responded in The Atlantic that weak ties and emergent organization fuel civic engagement that can challenge government power.  I wrote yesterday partnering the strong tie Skype network with the weak tie Facebook network will be difficult. But it’s worth solving those integration problems.
It’s the combination of weak and strong ties that is really at work in today’s civil engagement and in the wirearchical workplace.
Strong ties are dominated by the Dunbar Number limits, where you have trouble scaling intimate teams past 150 people. Small pools with strong ties have high levels of trust, work well together, nurture local/topical domain expertise, and possess cultural norms that keep the members aligned with their purpose.
Weak tie connections are brilliant at connecting those strong tie talent pools. The weak ties provide situational awareness, affirm the small groups are not isolated, signal opportunities and problems, coordinate larger tasks, disperse knowledge and new cultural norms, and help teams and talent discover each other.
So when you see strong tie systems in the collaboration space adding connections to weak tie systems in the social network and messaging space, you’re creating a better chance for healthier, more effective and larger scale communities and enterprises.
Skype’s long term identity will not be the new phone company. Skype is in the business of helping people manage their relationships.
Dear Skype,
Please:
- Join the Personal Data Ecosystem, a new umbrella organization and Identity Commons project, and participate in the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW)and Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) communities to advance person-centered identity and personal data concepts and technologies.
- Experiment with helping your customers visualize and act on their non-Skype social updates in the Skype context. New contextual conversation triggers from outside of Skype should foster better relationships and more, longer, better conversations.
- Expand SkypeWeb‘s presence service to also return mood messages where privacy settings permit.
- Start talks with Ping.fm, Comcast Plaxo and others who can help you pipe Skype’s updates through the social web.
- Test the effect of bringing workplace updates (from Yammer, SAP Friend Optimizer, Microsoft SharePoint, for example) into Skype on chat, conferencing and other calling behavior.
There’s an emerging role for Personal Data Stores (some people call it a personal data locker or data bank) that finds your information, collects it, and makes it easier for you to manage your relationships with the sites/services/apps/orgs that use or have custody of your data.
The Money Metaphor
One analog for the Personal Data Store is the bank where you store your money and keep it safe. They help you:
- get your money from other places
- put it to work passively with as they loan it out on your behalf and pay you interest
- pay others with your money through transfers, credit cards, EFTs, checking
- understand and manage your money’s states, flows, and allocations with metadata, reports, analysis and alerts
- comply with tax and other government authorities.
Continuing the bank analogy, vendors like Skype may take some of your money and hold it for you but that doesn’t make them a bank. Their core business isn’t helping you with your money. They just need to be responsible with your money and their own bank should work well with all of their customers’ banks.
The money metaphor for personal data works pretty well. People need institutions to act on our behalf, to be beholden to us for the security and utility of our personal information assets.
Back to Skype. 2008′s 28 “What Skype Means To Me” posts showed Skype bringing families closer together and helping people work remotely were more important than Skype’s disruption of the telecom industry. Skype’s true purpose, its long term identity, will not be the new phone company.
Skype at its core is in the business of helping me manage my relationships. Relationships are the accumulation of conversations and other things we do with each other. Those conversations and our social graph are awash in data. Yesterday I asked Skype to bring more of that data from other places into the Skype user experience.
There are two roles Skype-The-Company would play in this. The first is Social Peripheral Vision Provider. An SPPV provides a view into what is going on in the world through the lens of your interests and the people you know. You see this in desktop apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop and mobile apps like those from twitter, facebook, and foursquare. Consider this a role between social surveillance and social sousveillance.
The second role is as a Personal Data Store, helping Skype users control, manage, and employ their own profiles, updates, and the records of their conversations. None of the major internet or financial institutions does this well or at a broad consumer or business level. Google provides a measure of identity consolidation through the Google Profile. Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are substantial health PD projects.
Skype should be a PDS for your online data. Skype should help you:
- get your data from other places
- put it to work for you through de-personalized aggregation
- “Sign in with Skype”, authenticating my identity to other services
- field anonymized requests for contact (“someone at IBM would like to speak with someone like you at Skype Journal”)
- share your data with other services on request (“LinkedIn is checking for your latest contact information”)
- facet how you present yourself so your Warcraft avatar is different from your LinkedIn profile photo
- contextualize your social graph’s activity (“these seven work contacts are in this meeting”, “your Tallinn contacts are leaving the office for the night”, “you haven’t checked in with your usual Monday morning people”)
- withdraw from other services, removing my data thoroughly
Skype could be the fourth party in Vendor Relations Management where its billion users (just a few more years) contract their data to companies that use it. As Joe Andrieu explains in his VRM and Personal Data Stores post:
Here are a few rights that users might want to be able to secure for their data, as well as some privileges they could provide to vendors:
- Reciprocity – That vendors who access a particular type of data also agree to reciprocally provide updates to that data. For example, I might let Amazon access my media history records if they agree to update it with my past and future media purchases at Amazon.
- Non-propagation – No further distribution of the data beyond the specific services authorized. No reselling to third-parties. No re-use by other divisions.
- Non-persistence – No retention of the data beyond the session of the current transaction. For example, an emergency room physician can access my personal medical history while I’m under his or her care, but he or she can’t store that data on any internal systems.
- Anonymous Persistence – Data can be retained, but only if it is suitably anonymized and disassociated from the individual user.
- Editable Persistence – Data may be retained by the vendor, but it must be editable and deletable by the user.
- Anonymized Analytic Rights – Vendor has the right to query the PD at a later point for business or operational analysis, as long as that analysis ensures anonymity after the fact.
Doc Searls added to the Cluetrain Manifesto‘s “Markets are Conversations” premise a tenth chapter: “Markets are Relationships.” eBay’s instincts were good when they bought Skype, a conversation enabler, to make eBay’s markets better. Skype’s cloud infrastructure could bring great power to their user’s side of business relationships and rich, trusted customer data to the vendors’ side. This could easily be the line of business that outpaces SkypeOut as a Skype’s top income source.
 Birthday notifications trigger conversations annually. Why not trigger conversations all year long?
There’s a lovely new protocol for publishing and consuming updates among social networks. Activity Streams runs atop Atom or JSON and lets you syndicate notable activities on a site. Friending. Sharing. Posting. Events. I’d love to update my Skype mood and share it (publishing) on facebook, twitter, MySpace, Yahoo!, MSN and hundreds of other sites a la Ping.fm. The other way too: when I update elsewhere, update my Skype mood (consuming).
While you’re at it, update my contacts’ moods with their social activity. When I see my contacts, show their latest tweet, their last email in my inbox, a public event they RSVP’d.
My personal payoff as a user is threefold:
- I share my onlife with my Skype contacts, the way I do with my other social networks. This builds Skype as a tool for actively cultivating my relationships.
- Consuming and publishing cuts duplicate effort. I don’t have to re-enter updates in Skype in the spirit of data portability. This builds my productivity and Skype’s value as a time saver.
- It keeps my mood fresh, so it’s worth seeing. This makes me more interesting, active and relevant to my existing contacts. Again, cultivating my social capital.
The payoff for Skype is real too: more social objects lead to more conversations and to more diversity of conversation partners. Skype has an opportunity do do more than displace existing conversation channels, like the telephone or other IM networks. Skype can make the talking pie bigger, encouraging conversations that would not have taken place if it wasn’t for Skype.
A bit of prior art before we go. Julian Bond‘s Twype copies your latest tweet to your Skype mood message. I use Twype all the time. Twype also pings Moodgeist, a side project by Skype personnel (when was the last time we saw one of these?), that aggregates Skype moods. Moodgeist is now retired but it showed the plumbing for this wish is easy. Those were 2007-era pilots. The ActivityStream technology is spreading quickly, now used at Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, Google Buzz, Opera, TypePad, Gowalla.
I found this error message when I launched Skype for Windows Beta 5.0.0.123 this afternoon: "No flash player detected. Download it". News to me that Skype had any plug-in dependencies for its built-in browser. This is likely a bug, left over from prototyping, or triggered before needed by the (now hidden) video mood message controls.
You can see the art (animation?) used above to illustrate the Home tab’s tips/offers.
Browsers give third-party developers an easy canvass on which to paint. Skype would do well to open new tabs and panels to developers. The world would create a whole new class of lightweight web-style apps within the Skype client. HTML5, CSS, Javascript and maybe PHP could call the Skype Public API or the SkypeKit API for native features. Browser apps would lower the skill bar from the high complexity of a complete SkypeKit app down to something millions of web designers do every day.
update: second screenshot.
I pitched and demoed Practisimo tonight at the end of Startup Weekend – Education at San Francisco’s Dogpatch Labs.  Practisimo is a foreign language practice service. Practisimo brings native speakers to people who already know language who need to practice to keep their language skills alive. We started from scratch Saturday night, after killing our language lab product 24 hours into the project.
Joining up, speed-dating style, to form new business teams was entertaining. Getting the business design right was hard. Trusting strangers was spiritual. Decisiveness at top speed exposing your ignorance was unsettling. Keeping our collective eyes on the-very-next-thing-to-do was tiring.
Leaving Skype out of this real-time, just-in-time, find-someone-to-practice-with service was really easy .
Our requirements:
- We need technology like Chatroulette’s, where we pair two users so they talk to each other.
- We want to serve some users on mobile phones.
- We want to serve 1-to-1 video chat and text chat inside of our web site and inside of other sites like facebook.
- We don’t want to pay for bandwidth for our first million users.
Skype just couldn’t get us there.
We might have been able to use Skype network APIs, still under construction. But that’s for another year.
We thought about building it on SkypeKit, but I’ve been waiting for 125 days to even see the secret SkypeKit SDK documentation.
So we’re using other technology to help people talk to each other.
Video chat ran on the TokBox API. For the telephony part, between Twilio and Voxeo we chose Twilio; it was more familiar to one of our programmers (and Twilio co-sponsored #SWBAY). In-browser text chat used a little open sourced PHP. Forms and surveys ran on Wufoo. We cobbled a barely working, unlikely-to-scale, first-draft experience together using less than four hours of programmer time.
Today was Skype’s 7th birthday. Happy Birthday, Skype!
I wish I’d had a different story to tell. The new practice of entrepreneurship taught at #SWBAY ruthlessly focuses on doing the right things, right now, with the tools at hand, in ways that teach you what you need to move forward. Dear Skype, wish you were there.
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7 years and 2 days since Skype Journal launched as a stand-alone blog.
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Phil Wolff builds realtime collaboration products for effective people. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.
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