All good things must come to an end, it seems… after 7 years of providing an end-user client that has been blissfully free of any kind of advertising, Skype has announced the beginning of advertising in the Skype client.

And for the very first time, this is one feature I am very glad is NOT yet available in the Mac client!

Here’s what they say it will look like (image from Skype’s blog):

Sure, in Skype’s blog post, they have a whole bullet list of “details” about this new program, and do note this:

The ads won’t interrupt your Skype experience. You won’t suddenly see annoying pop-up ads or flashy banner ads in middle of conversations.

But still… we’ve been ad-free for 7 years of Skype usage.

I do realize that Skype is trying to add a great number of people, do an IPO, pay for their funky new office, etc. And I get that they can’t necessarily pay for all that purely on the revenue from the small percentage of people who pay for actual services.

But still… we’ve been ad-free for 7 years of Skype usage.

And I do realize that the vast majority of users are getting…

In about 45 minutes, Skype will be giving a keynote here at EnterpriseConnect in Orlando (1:30pm US Eastern) and will apparently be making a "big announcement" about Skype in the enterprise. They have been cagey about what the announcement is… but one contact I know well there says that I will "like it". 🙂

We will see how accurate he is… I will naturally be tweeting out the keynote live at:

http://twitter.com/danyork

FYI, the conference will be live streaming the keynote out at:

tv.enterpriseconnect.com

Want to see more (and better) pictures of Skype’s new funky office in Palo Alto? After I first wrote about photos of the new Skype office back in December, the designers of Skype’s office space let me know that they would have some photos of their own coming as part of their new website. Those photos are now online at:

http://designblitzsf.com/projects/skype-hq/

And yes, indeed, they do give a better view of the whole space, and some narrative text providing some context for the design, too. Very cool to see… as a network geek, I’m hoping that that map is live showing interactive Skype conversations 🙂

Many more cool shots over on the designers’ website…

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Wow! I might have just found a feature cool enough to get me to move over to Skype 5.0 for the Mac, despite my many concerns with it.

Hidden among the many IRC-style chat commands (but not included on that list) is this one that you can type into a group chat using either Skype 5.0 for Windows or Mac:

/golive

When you do that, everyone in the chat (using 5.0) gets a notification that there is a conference call and can choose to join into the conf call right then.

What’s even cooler is that the call can be either audio or video. Of course, video is only available if someone has a Group Video Calling subscription.

What’s even more cool is that the act of typing that command will generate a URL that you can simply pass along to anyone else to have them join a call. You’ll see the URL in your chat window. It takes the form (for me) of:

skype:danyork?call&token=1234

You can now send this URL to people via Skype IM… via other IM… via email… via Twitter… via Facebook…

Anyone who clicks on that link will…

Skype this week released a “Hotfix” for the Skype 5.0 for Mac OSX. Surprisingly the upgrade/update process is not automated… I chose “Check for Updates…” in the Skype menu of my 5.0 client and it told me I was up-to-date. However, when I clicked on the download link in that Skype blog post, I downloaded the new version and was able to drag it to my Applications folder to do the update.

From a user point-of-view, there don’t seem to be any new features in this release. It really is just a “hotfix” for a number of bugs, including the issue with Skype not letting other applications use the video camera that I affected some folks I know.

Anyway… Mac users who have gone ahead and moved to 5.0 may want to upgrade now (I have on one system and am still on 2.8 on another). The Skype blog post has a few more details on what was fixed.

P.S. If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s new with Skype 5.0 for the Mac, you may want to read about the “Gold” release, the launch of the beta of 5.0 for the Mac or my other Skype-related posts

If…

This morning’s visit to the AppStore on my iPhone brought news that Skype had rolled out version 3.0.1 of its iPhone client. The only news of what was in it was:

You can now make video calls to a wider selection of Skype clients and devices, such as Skype for TV.

It turns out (via a Skype blog post) that what this really means is that Skype has added the higher quality H.264 video codec to the app. As noted, this will let you do a video call with a Skype-equipped TV. (Which you bizarrely could not do from an iPhone before.)

While I don’t personally know anyone with a Skype-equipped TV, I’m looking forward to trying this out to see if it changes the quality of the video calls I make. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve used the iPhone quite a bit for video calls and been impressed so far.

Anyway, if you are an iPhone user, you can head on over to the AppStore and download this new version…

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If you go back in time to September 2008 and recall the whole kerfuffle over the Gogo in-flight WiFi service NOT allowing VoIP calls (which we also covered on Blue Box podcast #83), one of the threads that was floating around was the wish that they would at least allow chat over Skype. If you couldn’t make calls, at least you could have IM conversations.

I didn’t really pay any further attention to the matter and didn’t find myself on planes with Gogo WiFi until this past week… and found that yes, indeed, sometime in the last two+ years Gogo did relax the Skype chat restriction (at least on Delta flights).

The FAQ now clearly states that Skype IM is allowed, while VoIP services are still not permitted:

While I was on a short flight and didn’t feel the need to pay for the in-flight WiFi, it was nice to know that I could have used Skype IM if I had wanted to.

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When I saw that Skype had a blog post up about their effort to recruit as many as 350 new employees, I didn’t expect them to release a video… nor did I expect to be so amused seeing so many of my friends there cavorting around on the video!

As they note, Skype is hiring!

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This week Skype 5.0 for Mac OS X left the “Beta” label behind and was released as a production product. I naturally downloaded it onto the iMac where I’m running Skype 5.0… and found that while some changes were made (and some very good changes, I should add), it’s still a very different user experience from Skype 2.8 and one I’m still not sure about.

I did my usual test call with Jim Courtney, took a good number of screenshots and will write up some thoughts after using it a bit more.

Meanwhile, Jim’s out with his thoughts on the technical side:

Skype for Mac 5.0 Goes Gold: Incorporating Beta Feedback and More

While Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal took a different tack and wrote about the sentiment from Mac users about this new release:

Download: Skype for Mac 5.0 Gold

As Phil notes, the Skype community forums do have areas filled with disgruntled Mac users who are upset that Skype didn’t go far enough in incorporating their feedback.

I still need to work with it a bit more before I jump to that level… but I am glad to see that Skype incorporated some of the feedback. More…