Category: Skype
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Is Facebook Planning an Official Voice Calling Feature? With Skype? And Would Facebook Users Care?
Continue Reading: Is Facebook Planning an Official Voice Calling Feature? With Skype? And Would Facebook Users Care?News today out of ReadWriteWeb and The Daily What is that a “Call” button was spotted briefly inside someone’s Facebook profile:RWW goes on to speculate about whether or not this could be part of the “deep integration” between Facebook and Skype announced last September. Mike Melanson at RWW wrote this:
The move would make a lot of sense for Facebook, which has worked recently to become the center of your online communication experience. Its recent “not email” announcement debuted a form of communication that would supposedly work seamlessly between devices, so that there would be little differentiation between messaging, email and Facebook chat. Voice calling between users, whether from browser to browser, phone to browser, or browser to phone, would just make sense in creating a more seamless communication experience.
Now, there is the obvious question –
is the screenshot real?
Or are we being hoaxed? Having personally been in a situation where I received an inadvertant preview of possible new Facebook features (which sadly have yet to materialize), I’m inclined to believe that the screenshoot could be real.The Skype Connection?
But is it connected to Skype, as RWW wonders? The “deep integration” reported by RWW in September…
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Mozilla Blocks the Skype Toolbar in Firefox Because of Crashes (UPDATED: Skype Response)
Continue Reading: Mozilla Blocks the Skype Toolbar in Firefox Because of Crashes (UPDATED: Skype Response)Yesterday, the Mozilla team took the rather drastic step of adding the Skype Toolbar to their “Firefox Blocklist” so that the toolbar is disabled by default (with the user being notified and having the option to re-enable it). Mozilla’s reasoning is rather straightforward:
The current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, and was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week. Additionally, depending on the version of the Skype Toolbar you’re using, the methods it uses to detect and re-render phone numbers can make DOM manipulation up to 300 times slower, which drastically affects the page rendering times of a large percentage of web content served today
Yikes! If it’s causing that many crashes, I completely understand their rationale.
What’s interesting about this, of course, is that it shows the linkages beyond simply VoIP and communication into the larger ecosystem of applications. Here you have a web browser add-on for a communication product which is then slowing down or crashing the web browser product.
In this brave new world of Unified Communications, or whatever we want to call it, the apps are all linked together… which creates both benefits…
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Skype to boost headcount by 50% this year and offer SLAs
Continue Reading: Skype to boost headcount by 50% this year and offer SLAsThe Financial Times is out this morning with an article about Skype CEO Tony Bates and his plan to hire around 400 more people this year. The article offers some insight into his thinking, and included this piece related to encouraging more business usage:
Mr Bates said he is considering offering the so-called Service Level Agreements that most companies require from their suppliers to assure a guaranteed quality of service, and adding new services for businesses.
The creation of SLAs would be interesting to see, given Skype’s P2P nature, which I’ve explained previously particularly with regard to their recent outage. Not quite sure how they’d do it, unless they perhaps create a part of the P2P cloud that has Skype-operated supernodes and a version of the Skype client software that defaults to connecting to that part of the larger Skype cloud.
In any event, the FT article makes for interesting reading to get a bit of glimpse into the thoughts of Skype’s new CEO.
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Skype just crossed over 27 million simultaneous users online!
Continue Reading: Skype just crossed over 27 million simultaneous users online!Right now I looked at the bottom of my Skype window and saw that the count read 27,257,659 users online:Not bad considering that the company just crossed over 25,000,000 back in late November and then had the massive outage at the end of December! In fact, I don’t remember seeing Skype cross over the 26 million mark…
Congrats to Skype for hitting this milestone!
UPDATE: After Hudson Barton mentioned that the previous high number for online users was under 26 million, Neil Lindsey pointed me to the online chart of Skype users over the past 7 days, which shows that the count flirted with 26 million but did not cross it yesterday:
The 40-hour chart shows the climb in greater detail:
So Skype crossed over the 26 million mark AND the 27 million mark today! Not a bad day for Skype!
P.S. And yes, since Skype is the only source for these numbers, they could be completely making them up. However, I know (and trust) enough folks there to assume the numbers are accurate.
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Skype Buys Qik To Add Real-Time Video Recording, Sharing
Continue Reading: Skype Buys Qik To Add Real-Time Video Recording, SharingThe rumors started flying this morning… and continued for quite some time… and then were finally confirmed by a Skype blog post:Skype to acquire Qik
Qik has been around since 2006 and first came on my radar a few years back when Robert Scoble was using it heavily (he hasn’t recently). At the time, though, I still had an iPhone 3G and wasn’t able to use the streaming video (it worked only with the 3GS and now of course the 4) so I didn’t do much myself with Qik. I was, however, very impressed with what Steve Garfield was doing with it. In particular, I remember him bringing it to some Obama events in the Boston area in the run-up to the last US Presidential election and streaming them live from his phone.
The power of live streaming from a mobile device struck me then (and still does now) as quite a powerful content creation tool.
The acquisition of Qik by Skype is somewhat curious because of course Skype already has its own video technology, but the key seems to be in this part of their blog post:
… the acquisition of Qik will help to accelerate our leadership…
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What will Skype tell us tomorrow live from CES?
Continue Reading: What will Skype tell us tomorrow live from CES?Skype is promoting their live news conference tomorrow through a good number of channels… it will be at 10:30am PST (1:30pm US Eastern) at http://livestream.com/skypeI’m thinking it probably has something to do with… oh… video? 😉
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Want To Discuss the Skype Outage? Join the VUC Call Friday, Jan 7, at Noon US Eastern
Continue Reading: Want To Discuss the Skype Outage? Join the VUC Call Friday, Jan 7, at Noon US EasternWant to discuss the Skype outage? What happened? What we know about it? Supernodes? Mega-supernodes? Skype’s architecture? and more?On this Friday, January 7, 2011, I’ll be joining the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) gang to talk about Skype’s outage. As host Randy Resnick writes:
Mr. Dan York, CNN VoIP celebrity, will be with us for a more geeky explanation of what happened and hopefully what the full ramifications of this will be.
Skype has had a “monopoly” in this space for a long time. Can it continue? Are there contenders, and if so, who are they? Is the free model the key to Skype’s success? Will it always be free? Will it be passed up in quality by something different (like FaceTime (or a cross platform version of it) or Google Voice?
We’ll be talking about my post about Skype supernodes and much more. It should be an enjoyable time.
If you’d like to listen live, there are regular, SIP and Skype contact phone numbers to dial into the VUC. You can also jump on #vuc on IRC to join in the text backchannel.
If you can’t join live, a recording of the call will be posted to the episode’s…
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Video: My CNN UK Interview about Skype Supernodes
Continue Reading: Video: My CNN UK Interview about Skype SupernodesThe reaction to my last post explaining how Skype’s supernodes work has been both amazing and amusing. Largely the reaction points out to me that Skype really needs to do a better job explaining their architecture… but in their absence, others of us will do so.Anyway, one of the more fun outcomes was that I was asked to appear on a CNN UK show “Quest on Business” with host Richard Quest. Unfortunately the show was not streamed live nor was it available for viewing online later. Quite a FAIL on CNN’s part, in my opinion, because the segment certainly would have been linked to by some of us. In any event, my friend James Enck in the UK captured the segment by the super high tech method of pointing his cell phone at the TV and recording the video. 🙂
The irony, of course, is that we recorded the show entirely using Skype 😉
For those who wish to view the segment, here it is:
It was fun to do and hopefully helped some more folks out there understand a bit more about Skype. (And thanks, James, for capturing it.)
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Understanding Today’s Skype Outage: Explaining Supernodes
Continue Reading: Understanding Today’s Skype Outage: Explaining SupernodesFor the first time in 3 years, Skype was down today – and as I write this is still in the process of slowly coming back online. A ton of articles were written today, mostly all pointing back to Skype’s blog post or status update, which most importantly said this (I’ve shortened it a bit):
Some of these computers are what we call ‘supernodes’ – they act a bit like phone directories for Skype. If you want to talk to someone, and your Skype app can’t find them immediately … your computer or phone will first try to find a supernode to figure out how to reach them.
Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some of you.
Let’s explain this a bit more.
Explaining Supernodes
If you go back and read my primer on the technology behind Skype and P2P networks, I described supernodes as Skype clients that are on the public Internet and NOT behind a firewall or NAT device that broker…
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Apparently I’m Now Skype’s Corporate Receptionist!
Continue Reading: Apparently I’m Now Skype’s Corporate Receptionist!It has happened twice this morning. People calling my phone number looking to talk to someone at Skype. For quite some time now (months), I have received occasional random phone calls from people looking for Skype and when I’ve asked it was usually because they searched in Google and ultimately somehow came up with my number (which I publish freely here on my blogs).This morning, though, I asked the two gentlemen who called how they got my number, and these were there responses:
“I was calling MasterCard to report a fraud and they gave me this number for Skype.”
“Capital One told me to call this number.” (Capital One is a US credit card issuer.)
Oops.
You see, here is the fundamental problem:
SKYPE DOES NOT LIST A SINGLE PHONE NUMBER ON THEIR WEB SITE!
Don’t believe me? Visit www.skype.com and try it yourself. Find a regular PSTN phone number… I dare you to try! (And if you do, please leave a comment here!)
The closest you may get is to the “Where is Skype?” page that lists Skype’s Luxembourg address and an email address, but no phone number. Their…