More Skype love/hate updates

My love/hate relationship with Skype, that I’ve blogged on and off for the past few years, continues. I’m once again a big user, not to save money on already-cheap phone calls, but rather because it is invaluable in terms of its functionality. So here’s some personal and generic news:

1. For 1-1 videophone functionality, it’s simple, powerful, and ‘does the right thing’ without fuss.

2. Without the video, the instant call functionality is still great – I’ve bought two hardware Skype cordless phones (branded Du@lPhone) for this purpose… wireless models so I can roam around the building and talk telephone-style at the same time. I prefer it to a headset: mainly because it ’sends the right visual signals’ to people who pop into my office, telling them that I am ‘on the phone’!

3. Yes, there are the “my computer has become a SuperNode for the whole country” worries I blogged about in the past (see links above), but it’s a tradeoff: items 1 and 2 are so good, that most of the time I just don’t care.

4. For multiparty video, there are plenty of experimental packages like wigi (see for example Bill Campbell’s 19th April 2006 blog entry about it, courtesy tipoff from Jens Gammelgaard – thanks!). For more than two users, I can’t be bothered to fuss any more, and have always been disappointed with multiparty Skype: nothing beats the click-and-go zero-install simplicity of FlashMeeting. Some people moan about FlashMeeting’s push-to-talk style. Hey: for multiparty usage, that’s one of the many things I love about it!!

5. Hmmm… how about merging location information and Skype-ish presence and communication, just like we’ve been doing in BuddySpace for years? Now Plazes has published their API so the Plazes/Skype mashups have become a reality — see Bill Campbell’s article “Location, location, location! Plazes comes to Skypeland”.

Technorati Tags: skype, voip, p2p, videophone, buddyspace, flashmeeting, videoconferencing