Happy 4th Birthday, Twitter!

Congratulations, Twitter! To get the most out of both Skype and Twitter, try Twype. Julian Bond's Twype (Windows) pipes your latest tweet to your Skype mood message.

Four things Skype could learn from Twitter:

1. "Sign in with Twitter" makes having a Twitter identity more valuable to customers and web site owners. "Sign in with Skype" would be an easy hit.
2. Twitter Lists show how important and useful it is to organize your contacts and share them.
3. Twitter's API makes it easy to create Twitter clients, devices, and services. Twitter encourages the marketplace of ideas to experiment with user experience and add value. Server-based APIs get uptake; client-side ones like Skype's don't.
4. Following is not Friending. Twitter shows the value of supporting asymmetric relationships. You can fill your inbox with a stream of news, family, celebrity life, and colleague updates. You can share opinion and updates with the world, just to those your trust, or privately one-to-one. Although Skype is fantastic at symmetric, mutually close, relationships, it's a blunt tool for treating the many kinds of people in your world.

Three things Twitter could learn from Skype:

1. Community supported localization. More markets, every product, with the help of volunteers.
2. The Freemium business model can work. Cash fuels growth and keeps customers loyal.
3. Ladder of intimacy. Skype makes it easy to shift conversations from presence to IM to voice to video. Twitter doesn't let you dive deeper into a conversation without leaving.

Happy Birthday! And thanks for all the fun.

tags: twitter, skype, twype, #twitterday

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Why Oprah's Skype day was ineffective: tone and Skype

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Navigation. Skype's UI is not designed to let search, sort, browse, discover, organize a million contacts. Not even ten thousand contacts.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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?
8. 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?

1. Broadcast alerts and information. IM news relevant to fans based on language, interests, location, and length of relationship.
2. 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?
3. 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.

See also:

• Jim Courtney's great play-by-play of the Oprah show
• flickr set of photos from the show

tags: skype, tv, television, us, canada, marketing, promotion, tie-in, oprahwinfrey, oprah, theoprahwinfreyshow, scale, fame

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Ashton Skypes Oprah, disrupting electronic field TV production

Watch famous people using Skype. Skype quickly fades into the background, focus returning to the people and what they say. But how did they do it? Why use Skype when The Oprah Winfrey Show can rent a team to shoot Ashton Kutcher's side of the segment?

Remote participation via Skype in television production is disruptive technology: vastly more convenient, orders of magnitude cheaper, and lower but tolerable quality than other forms of electronic field production.

• Cost. Today's remote live video shoots might cost $25k+ for satellite time, gear, van, and a crew (camera operator, sound recordist, producer, hair & make-up artist, lighting technician). This is more production value than a field reporter

  On the other hand, let's say it costs $10k for a high-end Mac including free Skype software, webcams, insurance, geek time, mobile Internet, and a mobile phone for the control channel. Spread the cost over twenty guests/interviews, you might spend $500 for a shoot where the guest hooks themselves up in 15 minutes (power into the laptop, plug in the webcam, turn it on, fire up Skype, press the green "Video Call" button). And now guests like Kutcher are Skype-ready; no cost to you.

• Convenience. With broadband in many places, with laptops and webcams benefiting from Moore's Law, you can overnight a Skyped-up laptop with a good webcam and a good microphone, ready to go tomorrow. Or your guest runs out to Best Buy or RadioShack for a webcam and is back and ready in 90 minutes.

• Acceptable Quality. Skype doesn't capture in hi-def and most webcams don't use the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. Skype can reproduce 640x480@30fps with high end webcams, good enough for talking heads. You can see that Ashton's end of the show is poorly lit, color balance is off, he's not been through hair or makeup (or wardrobe), his office is badly decorated to get unlicensed art off the wall behind him. Nobody cares.

Skype's dialtone made that show possible without blowing the show's budget, without flying Kutcher from his office at Katalyst Films to Chicago for three days, spending five hours hosting a remote crew at his office, or even three hours to drive to a local television station for fifteen minutes of air time. It was almost as easy as having someone phone in. But with better audio and with live two-way video.

This changes the economics of television production. Don't ration your remote guest spots because they cost too much or take too long to prep. Just Skype them to your studio, enrich your program with live, just-in-time feeds on the cheap.

People are bringing Skype into the workplace. Millions solve problems, lower costs, create new services, work more effectively, and unleash human talent. The O Show is just one of the most visible.

P.S. Here's the second half of the segment.

See also:

• [BBC] Reporters Using Skype, Skype Journal, 2005
• Skype Video for "Live On Location" Television, Skype Journal, 2007
• The Skype - Oprah Feedback Loop - It Works in Strange Ways, Skype Journal, 2008
• Skype product placement: Who Wants to be a Millionaire (US), Skype Journal, January 2009

tags: skype, twitter, productivity, television, production, collaboration, innovation, distruption, disruptive technology, oprah, oprahwinfrey, ashton, ashtonkutcher

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Ping.fm takes updates from Skype IM

Ping.fm is a synch service in the social stack, mostly in microblogging and rich presence. Set up on Ping.fm:

Enable posting with Skype

To enable posting through Skype, request to add the bot "pingdotfm" by searching for the username and add it as a contact. When the bot appears on your contacts list, send it an IM with your verification code.

The ping.fm page will show your verification code once you log in to the site.

Ping.fm posts results in multiple places.

Twitter. (microblogging)

Vox. (blogging)

LinkedIn. (professional network updates)

This is one of many ways to update your Ping.fm account so Ping.fm can update your many online lifestreams. Ping.fm's bots also talk with AIM, jabber (including Google Talk), Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.

Hat tip to the Pacific IT chat.

tags: skype, ping.fm, synch, synchronization, dataportability, microblogging, im, chat, twitter, linkedin, vox

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Access Your Skype Contacts via Truphone

Over the past few years we have seen the evolution of several conversation communities, some simply employing instant messaging; others employing both instant messaging and voice. Skype is the primary example with its support of IM, voice and video as well as auxiliary features such as file sharing (and, as announced tonight, basic screen sharing) but we are also seeing these services diffuse into Google, via GTalk's voice and chat capability, MSN Live via Live Messenger, and, in spite of its trying to define who they are, Yahoo.

Truphone is a mobile voice calling service that I have used for a couple of years from a Nokia N95-1; it became critical in a situation I encountered in Germany two years ago. I have liked both the quality of the voice calls as well as the user interface, especially its use of the device's native address book for initiating a call. While they have had some hiccups with their recent product launches, Truphone has become the leader in providing low cost calling from the iPhone while breaking the carrier barrier via Apple's App Store. I will soon be reporting on Truphone Anywhere for BlackBerry. Now, under recently appointed CEO Geraldine Wilson, Truphone is making a move to grow their user base rapidly by leveraging the user bases of other services.

This evening at the MacWorld Showstoppers event Truphone announced an enhanced Truphone for iPhone providing connectivity to these four conversation communities. Supporting both instant messaging and voice conversations, voice calls to, say, Skype contacts are free provided they go over a WiFi connection. Calls to these communities can also be made over a carrier's 3G network, usually at the cost of a local call. In addition Truphone is providing access to Twitter as one additional messaging service accessible via Truphone's iPhone application.

In my interview this evening with new Truphone CEO Geraldine Wilson, she pointed out:

• Using Skype as an example, Truphone's enhancements set up an appropriate Skype client on a Truphone gateway and complete the call to the Skype contact, taking advantage of Skype's peer-to-peer architecture such that there are no resulting termination charges.
• By introducing instant messaging, Truphone is recognizing the key role IM is taking on in IP-based conversations where a conversation may start over a chat session and migrate to a voice session if deemed appropriate.
• Truphone sees the introduction of these enhancements as a key to building the Truphone user community; Truphone generates revenue through offering low cost calling to/from the landline and mobile PSTN network.
• Truphone is looking at adding BlackBerry and Android to their supported platforms for this service over the next few months. Key here are devices that support an application store in order to make user access to these services simple and trivial.
• To avoid high roaming charges it is recommended that Truphone for iPhone be used either over a WiFi connection anywhere worldwide but only over a user's home country 3G carrier.
• These new features go live on next Monday, January 12.

Some outstanding questions:

• Given that the Truphone application needs to be active for conversations, how will this work when other applications are open? Currently if I have Truphone as the open application on my iPhone, I can receive free Truphone calls and my presence will be indicated to other Truphone for iPhone users if I am in their "Favorites" tab. However, if I am in another iPhone application, I cannot receive "free" Truphone calls over WiFi; nor is my presence indicated to others. I look forward to seeing how the enhanced Truphone handles Instant Messaging when Truphone is not the "open" application on the iPhone. This is where BlackBerry's full multi-tasking capability is a major advantage over the iPhone.
• Calling Skype contacts involves providing your SkypeID and password. What security is in place to maintain the confidentiality of this information. What other security aspects are compromised as a result of placing the calls via a connection to a gateway that supports the caller's Skype client.
• What is Skype's reaction to having Truphone siphon off what could otherwise potentially be SkypeOut revenues while leveraging the Skype user base and using the "free" aspect of Skype? We know Skype is working to launch mobile phone applications, probably this week at CES. With iSkoot and the Skypephone on 3's networks, as we learned at last year's eComm 2008 iSkoot presentation, a portion of carrier revenues are shared between Skype and iSkoot.

A major step forward in making low cost calls worldwide, Truphone's moves once again emphasize that WiFi is becoming an ever growing alternative connection option to making wireless calls. At the same time it will be interesting to see how the business model plays out in a world where the cost of voice calling continues to move towards zero.

GigaOm: Truphone Brings Skype to iPhone and iPod Touch

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SyncMood and Twype for Windows

SyncMood and Twype copy your twitter updates into Skype for Windows. I’ve had great success with Twype for a while. Now I’m trying SyncMood, happily so far. Thanks, Andrej.

This is part of a few broader patterns.

Open Platforms. Skype’s and Twitter’s APIs are public, free, and easy. So people can build apps that work with them.

Social Sync. Update once, see it everywhere you want it seen. As a category, this is getting smarter. I’m seeing useful features like

• Deduplication. Your update gets caught in feedback loops among networks, creating echoes. Deduping dampens the feedback loops. 
• Time stamp preservation. Assures an update’s original date/time is passed through, not the time it was last passed along.
• Accurate provenance. Keeping metadata about an update’s original system/service source.

Lifestream Shaping. Setting up filters and agents so you and others see only what matters, at the best times, in the best media, in the right contexts. One response to social network overload. 

Data Portability. The social platforms, and the sync and lifestreaming tools which use them, put some power in user hands. It puts a little proof behind a promise that your-data-is-really-yours.

Technorati tags: skype, plug-ins, SyncMood, twype, skypeapi, skype api, platforming, twitter, sync, social sync, lifestreams, data portability, dataportability

Twitter4Skype. Following Your Twitter Life within Skype

Borderless Communicator's Hudson Barton and I both follow our Twitter friends using a nifty third party Skype utility called Twitter4Skype. Basically you set up Twitter4Skype as a Skype Contact and enter your account information. Going forward, whenever you are logged onto Skype and a Tweet arrives from one of those whom you are "Following", it will pop up in a Twitter4Skype chat window. And, of course, your messages placed into a Twitter4Skype chat window become "Tweets" seen by all your Twitter Followers.

We both have had many requests for instruction on how to set up Twitter4Skkype. Hudson has authored for Skype Journal a review of Twitter4Skype with all the details:

Twitter4Skype: A Review
by Hudson Barton

One of my favorite online tools is "Twitter4Skype". Not very many people know about "T4S", but if you are a fan of both Skype and Twitter, your life will be made much happier and more productive if you use this little robot. It does not require you to download any software. There are no additional processes to clog up your computer. There are no additional windows for you to deal with. Everything runs within Skype as a normal Skype chat session. It could not be simpler.

• First, the robot posts your tweets directly into your twitter account from Skype. When you IM into your Twitter4Skype chat session, the message appears automatically in your Twitter feed.
• Second, the robot gathers tweets of everyone whom you are following and posts them to you in the same Skype chat session.

Installing twitter4skype:

1. Using "Add a Contact", search for and add "twitter4skype" as a Skype contact.
2. Open a chat session with "twitter4skype"
3. Type the following into the chat window (to tell the robot about your your Twitter account and give the robot permission to access it):
   
   1. /account (shift+return)
      
   2. twitteraccountname (shift+return)
      
   3. twitteraccountpassword (return)
      
4. The robot should return: "twitter4skype Registration complete!"

Running Twitter4Skype:

1. The next time you write a chat message to "twitter4skype", the entry will appear on your Twitter account and a confirmation of your posting will appear in the chat. Note that only the first 140 characters of your posting will be received by Twitter, so keep it short and sweet.
2. You will begin to receive your friends’ twitters in the one-to-one Skype chat session with T4S.
3. Try adding another Skype contact to the chat you are having with T4S. You have now established a one-way group Twitter feed. What you (and only you) post into that chat will be distributed to Twitter and to the other members of the chat. Incoming tweets will be distributed to all chat participants.
4. Try adding the T4S contact to another group chat: You have just established a special relationship between Twitter and yourself that distributes your posts (and only your posts) from that chat into your Twitter stream. Incoming tweets are not posted into this extra chat, but go to your main T4S chat only.

Tricks for keeping twitter4skype healthy and happy:

Twitter4skype is running on a server in Tokyo Japan. Its reliability and the stability of the server have been improving, but like everything in our technological world (especially free services), it sometimes disappoints. Although you might glean the following tips from the Twitter4Skype help screen (accessed by typing "#help" in the chat), here is how to avoid some common problems:

• Situation: T4S appears to be offline. Occasionally T4S will appear to be offline when it is actually online. You will not be able to receive your Twitter feed in this state and you will not be able to post your own twitter either. You can "wake up" T4S" by calling it. When you do, your queued incoming tweets will be posted to you immediately, and afterwards you will be able to post your own tweets. If this does not work, then T4S is actually offline rather than only appearing so.
  
• Situation: T4S appears to be online but is unresponsive. Occasionally T4S will "forget" its relationship with you. Although it is online, you are not receiving incoming tweets and it will not post your outgoing tweets. You can force T4S to reset your relationship by typing "#on" into the T4S chat window. T4S will respond with a "welcome back" message.

What the Robot can't do:

Twitter4Skype is a simple robot. It knows only the tricks outlined above. Here are some tricks I wish it could do additionally:

• My Twitter use is evolving toward two separate accounts; one for personal and one for business to reflect my multiple personalities. But I really want to run only one Skype account and have both twitter accounts feed into it. So, with my second twitter account I would like to create a second T4S account and run it inside the same Skype name with separate T4S chats. Unfortunately, that is impossible. One T4S account per Skype name is the limit.
  
• Twitter4Skype is all about following and being followed by Twitter users. Now imagine you could follow and be followed by Skype users in the same way (without sharing contact information). Skype users are already connected to a universe of some 36 million other active Skype users worldwide. So why can't Skype establish a network of followers within its own system. A percentage of those contacts will lead to shared Skype contact information, and those relationships will lead to increased Skype calling. A pseudo Skype chat established for this purpose would be one way to implement the concept.

Thanks, Hudson.

One additional point: If you have set up your Twitter feed to send tweets into your Facebook status message, then entering a message into a Twitter4Skype session will also pass it along to become your "current" Facebook status message. Same applies if you have linked Friend feed to your Twitter messages. (Unfortunately nobody has offered a means to pass your tweets along to your Skype Mood Message.)

And, when I am away from my office, I am able to follow my Twitter activity as a "twitter4skype" chat session in iSkoot on my BlackBerry.

Tags: Hudson Barton, Borderless Communicator, twitter4skype, Twitter, Facebook, BlackBerry, iSkoot

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