NOTE: This appears to be an experimental feature added by a Skype developer... and as I note at the bottom, it has some bugs.
Here's what you need to do:
1. On your Mac, using either the Finder or the command-line, whichever you prefer, go to the directory/folder /Users/yourmacusername/Library/Application Support/Skype/yourskypeusername. (For example, my directory is /Users/dyork/Library/Application Support/Skype/danyork)
2. With some text editor, open the file config.xml.
3. Toward the end of the file, you will see a section of XML about <UI> and inside of that a subsection <General>. In that General section, add these two lines:
Ta da... now anything you type in your Mood Message Chat or regular Mood Message window will show up in Twitter.
Now I found out about this when I sent some feedback to Skype about my initial use of the 2.8 Beta and said "I already have enough places to update status - why can't this be linked to, say, Twitter?" The email response mentioned this hack of the config file. I have no idea whether this feature will be improved in some future version (and perhaps supported) or if it will be removed... or simply remain as a hack for those who want to go through the work.
A MAJOR CAVEAT - It does, though, seem to have at least one major bug. If those of you following my Twitter stream wondered why I had tweets coming out that were simply something like "Define", here's why...
the Skype-to-Twitter integration seems to chop what is sent to Twitter after a single or double-quote
So setting my Skype mood message to:
Define "VoIP" - and then we can talk about it's death!
wound up simply being this in Twitter:
Define
Similarly, mood messages I have entered with apostrophes (such as "Here's a link to .... ") wind up only sending the part before the apostrophe. It would appear to pretty obviously be a bug in how this code is written. Maybe they'll fix that. Maybe they won't.
Still, if you can avoid apostrophes and quotes, it does provide a nice way for Skype mood messages to go to Twitter. Obviously this means that Skype is where you originate your Twitter messages (or at least some of them... the ones that you update in your Mood Messages).
Going the other way and allowing Twitter messages to update your Skype mood message would also be great... but that's not this particular feature.
And there you have it... have fun with it!
P.S. Sorry, Windows and Linux Skype users, this appears to be another Mac-only feature...
Tonight out at the "ShowStoppers" event at MacWorld in San Francisco, Skype announced the new 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X. The new version will apparently be available for download tomorrow, January 6, 2009, from Skype's website. [NOTE: I will update this post with the download link when it becomes available.]
Continuing Skype's rather fragmented product strategy, they have rolled out some new features in this 2.8 beta release that will at least stop us Mac users from whining about Windows users always getting the good stuff first. Here's the quick list of what Skype notes is in this release:
Skype Access
Screen Sharing
Improved chat management: ability to sort chats in the drawer and set priorities to chats
Quick Add: much easier to add people to chats
Mood message chat: mood message updates from your friends as chat messages
Large avatars: 256x256 pixels
Hidden avatars in incoming contact requests
Ability to add your own notes to contacts
Courtesy of Skype's PR team, I've had a chance to play with the 2.8 beta for a couple of weeks and have these thoughts below...
SKYPE ACCESS
Probably the largest "new" feature is "Skype Access", a service that lets you go to any of the 100,000 Boingo WiFi hotspots and - using Skype - connect to the Boingo hotspot. When you connect, you pay on a per-minute basis and the fee (roughly 20 cents per minute) is deducted from your Skype Credit. You do not have to pay the Boingo monthly fee. You do not have to pay any hourly or daily fees.
Judging from the news release and pre-release info, Skype is immensely proud of this feature but I will be honest and say it does little for me. I just don't use WiFi hotspots as much while traveling (especially now that I'm paying for a wireless broadband adapter). However, I can see how this could be of value. If all you wanted to do was crack open your Mac and send some email, this gives you a great way to do that on a per-minute basis. If I were a heavy user of WiFi hotspots, I'd want to do the math to figure out if it would just be cheaper to buy a monthly Boingo access.
Regardless, it's an interesting move for Skype to get into the business of connecting you to Internet access.
SCREEN SHARING
The coolest feature of the 2.8 beta is a "screensharing" feature where you can share either your entire screen or just a portion of your screen with the Skype user on the other end. Now, this works with all other versions of Skype because it replaces your video stream with the screen sharing. So a Mac Skype user can share their screen with Windows and Linux users.... which is pretty cool.
It's hard to show in a blog post, but if you watch my screencast about the 2.8 beta, you can see it in action:
You can share either your entire desktop or just a section of your screen. You can also resize the section you are sharing while you are in the middle of sharing. When you stop sharing, you just flip back to showing your video.
CHAT PRIORITIZATION
By far the most useful feature I've found in the 2.8 beta is the ability to set the "priority" of a chat session - and then sort your chat sessions by priority in the Mac's "drawer" way of displaying chat sessions. I can just control-click a chat (either a private or public chat) and then go down to the "Set Priority" menu choice:
You can then sort the chats based on their priority using the drop-down menu at the top of the "drawer":
You can also sort based on title or date. Personally I've found the Sort by Priority to be very useful when you have, as I do, a zillion chats open at any one time. (And yes, I report to RJ, our CTO, so his chat gets the highest priority! ;-) )
MOOD MESSAGE CHAT - AND FOLLOWING (like Twitter)
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the 2.8 beta is the new "Mood Messages" pseudo-chat that you can enable in the Advanced part of the Skype Preferences:
Once you enable the "Mood Message Chat", you get a new chat window that opens up that shows you the mood messages of all of your contacts:
It also very nicely lets you set your mood message simply by typing in the window as you would to any other chat window. This is quite nice for someone like me who almost never changes my mood message in the regular window.
This actually makes Skype mood messages useful to me.
However, because of that other option that says "Show iTunes song in my mood message", you rapidly wind up seeing that a whole lot of people have that option checked and your Mood Message Chat rapidly fills with updates of music people listen to. What if you don't want to see their updates? Well, Skype has made it so that you can "follow" updates from your contacts through a simple menu choice:
The down side here is that if you enable the Mood Message Chat, you are following all your contacts by default and have to go through and "unfollow" (i.e. uncheck the menu choice) people you don't want to follow. It would be great if Skype had a "follow by default" or a "stop following all contacts" choice... something along those lines to let you control who you are following.
The intriguing aspect here is that this enables you to turn Skype mood messages into the kind of status updates that you typically have in Twitter, Facebook, or any of the other zillion services offering status updates. The great thing here is that it is simply another Skype chat window like all your other chats. (Of course, you can get a Skype chat for Twitter using "twitter4skype", but this is now with Skype mood messages.)
I think, though, for it to reach any kind of real usage, you need more people to enable this feature (it is off by default) and actually start using it - and for that it also needs to be on more platforms.
[As a tease, I'll mention that there is a way to integrate this mood message chat with Twitter, so anything I type there also shows up in my Twitter stream... but I'll write about that in a separate blog post as it's not directly tied to the 2.8 beta release. Soon...]
QUICK ADD
Another nice feature is the ability to quickly add someone to a chat through a button at the top of the chat window. You click on the window and start typing in a contact's name:
Before you could always drag-and-drop a contact from your main Skype window into a chat, but now you can use this quick add button. It is particularly useful if you have a large number of Skype contacts.
NOTES ON CONTACTS
Another useful feature is the ability to add private notes to each of your Contacts. So you could store information about how you know the person... their interests... basically anything you want as it is a free-form text field:
What's not yet clear to me is where these notes are stored. Are they accessible through multiple Skype clients if you were logged in on multiple machines? Or are they tied to the machine where you create the Notes? I'm guessing that they are stored with the local client like chat histories are.... but I'd need to have multiple installations of the 2.8 beta to really know this.
OTHER FEATURES
Skype also added a few other features:
New set of icons
Large avatars: You can now have images up to 256x256 pixels in size.
Hidden avatars in incoming contact requests - so you aren't exposed to images that might be offensive.
There are undoubtedly other features that we'll find as we work with it more.
CONCLUSION
So with this 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X, Skype provides some interesting new capabilities. I can see the screen sharing being quite useful to show people what's on my screen. The chat prioritization is great for heavy chat users like me. The possibilities of actually making the Mood Messages useful intrigue me. Frequent WiFi hotspot users may find the Skype Access feature useful and economical.
All in all, it's a great evolution of the Skype client for Mac OS X.
I do wish, though, as I've discussed before, that Skype's product strategy weren't so fragmented. Sure, as a Mac user, it's fun for a few minutes to have some features that Windows users don't have... but that fun rapidly fades when I can share my desktop with a Windows user but they can't share their's. And they almost never use the Mood Messages because it's not convenient to do so.
Perhaps most annoyingly, I am currently in a position where I am helping some Windows users get started with Skype and so I'm trying to help them with their Skype client... when mine is markedly different. It's a frustrating experience. I do hope Skype's new management can help converge the product streams so that the user experience (and technical support experience) is closer between platforms (while, yes, acknowledging that platforms have UI/behavior differences). We'll see.
In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy using this new beta on my Mac and seeing what else might be inside the release.
Again, Skype indicates that the 2.8 beta will be available tomorrow, January 6, 2009, for download for Mac OS X users.
I'll look forward to reading what you all think...
Aswath Rao and Luca Filigheddu came closest to the mark in their posts. The fundamental problem with this entire debate is simply this:
Define "VoIP"?
As I discussed in an Emerging Tech Talk video podcast I put up this morning, there are a range of definitions you could give to "VoIP", including, but not limited to, the following:
The underlying infrastructure, a.k.a. the "plumbing" - the mechanisms, protocols, etc. that are used for the transport of voice/video/etc. over IP. Things like SIP, H.323, RTP, various codecs, etc.
Consumer "PSTN line replacement" services - Offerings like those of Vonage and so many others where the basic idea is that you can get cheaper telephone charges by going over the Internet and getting rid of your local landline. Also called "pure play" VoIP by some or "VoIP arbitrage" by others.
Computer-to-computer/softphone offerings, often coming from the IM space - Skype sets the bar here, but there's a host of other players as well, including Gizmo, GoogleTalk, FWD, and many others. Some of these came from existing Instant Messaging services that simply added voice.
Enterprise IP-PBX/"Unified Communications" solutions - Communications systems used by enterprises, large and small - what has traditionally been called the "PBX" but that term is increasingly meaningless given the range of options now being provided.
The *entire* vision of rich communication over IP - The whole picture... everything over IP... voice, video, IM, presence, file/data sharing... the whole rich communication experience.
Each and every one of these is referred to as "VoIP" by some segment of our industry. (And there's even more... I did have someone once reply to me that "VoIP" was the pre-paid calling cards that you can buy in convenience stores, etc. (And in truth, they usually do get their cheap rates by using VoIP for transport somewhere in there.))
The point is that we need to be a bit more precise in what we call "VoIP" before we can argue about whether it is alive or not.
From my point-of-view, the life and death of these different definitions of "VoIP" varies:
The underlying infrastructure - Doing extremely well... in fact, so well, that it's fading into the background and just being part of our underlying network infrastructure, both in the fixed and mobile environments. (Which also argues that some of the VoIP-infrastructure-specific products/services are no longer quite as necessary.)
Consumer "PSTN line replacement" services - Great for cable companies; not so good for pure-plays - Looked at Vonage's stock price lately? They and so many of the other companies whose only real selling point was "get cheaper phone calls with us" are certainly struggling or dying. Why? The cable companies, for one, are cleaning up in this space with their "triple-play" bundling of voice with Internet access and television. The pure-play companies may be cheaper on voice but the cable packages may be far more compelling. Add in the "unlimited calling" mobile phone plans we have here in North America, plus the softphone players like Skype plus some of the emerging cloud/hosted offerings... and all-in-all it's not a pretty picture for Vonage and friends. (And this is really the VoIP "industry" to which Alec was referring.)
Computer-to-computer/softphone offerings - Very alive - Skype is flirting with 15 million simultaneous online users and also reporting decent income, Gizmo is rolling out a Flash-based softphone to remove the need for a client, TringMe is providing widgets to various folks... and a whole range of others are growing. (While some players are shrinking here, too, of course.)
Enterprise IP-PBX/"Unified Communications" solutions - Very alive - Basically every vendor supplying communications systems to enterprises are now doing so over IP. No one is selling traditional TDM PBXs anymore. Players in this space include the traditional telephony players like Nortel, Avaya, Siemens, Mitel, Alcatel-Lucent, along with newer entrants like the dominant Cisco, ShoreTel, Digium/Asterisk and then even newer entrants like Microsoft OCS and IBM Sametime.
The *entire* vision of rich communication over IP - VERY alive! - In fact, I'd say that the next few years will be one of the most fascinating years in this space. We're at this amazing intersection of insane amounts of local bandwidth and computing power, increasingly ubiquitous powerful mobile devices, and incredible power out "in the cloud". All around us we are building the massive IP communications interconnect. It's happening. At a glacial pace in some areas and at a crazy pace in others. We're layering on applications and services. We're making them available through simple APIs and mashups. We're all collectively doing some pretty amazing things out there. It's a great time to be in this space!
So how do you define VoIP?
If you think of "VoIP" as my #2, the "cheap telephony consumer services", then sure, if you don't consider the cable companies then than sector isn't doing too well. If you define VoIP as one of the other definitions here, well, then in my view it is very much alive.
2008 turned out to be a great year on so many different fronts... despite all the larger economic challenges. I had hoped to write up a longer end-of-year retrospective post, but alas, here it is, the end of the last day of the year.... That fact, in and of itself, speaks volumes about what a year 2008 was - A blur!
I think the single biggest thing I want to say right now as 2008 draws to a close is simply this:
THANK YOU!
Thank you to all of you who have continued to read my various posts... who have provided comments... who have answered the many questions I've thrown out there... who have challenged my viewpoints and forced me to defend - and refine - my positions... who have commiserated and rejoiced... who have sent me email suggestions... who have met up with me at conferences... who have generally just participated in this larger community. I've met some amazing people throughout the last year, learned an incredible amount and had a lot of fun along the way.
Thank you.
The community around this wacky industry in which we work and play continues to awe and inspire me. It's a privilege to be part of it and I look forward to working with many of you even more in 2009.
Happy New Year to you all!
[1] And for those unfamiliar with REM, here's the song I'm referencing in my title.
Do you use Twitter and are interested in finding people on Twitter to follow related to telephony, VoIP, Asterisk, communications, etc? Well the folks over at the VoIP Users Conference have put together a website that provides a directory of twitter users related to those topics. If you'd like, you can add yourself using this form.
It's nice to see a directory like that, although it's unfortunate that you can't simply click on the person's twitter name to see their page. Perhaps this was done to counteract spammers because if live links were allowed the directory might be rapidly overrun with spammers looking for SEO. I don't know... the good news is that Twitter names are all short.
Naturally I added myself, both with my personal 'danyork' Twitter account as well as the 'voxeo' Twitter account I use for our blog posts and other communication.
It seems this month is a month for VoIP/Communications-related bloggers to move around... Beyond Jon Arnold, Ken Camp has announced that his regular blogging relationship with Realtime has come to an end and that he will no longer be blogging at the Realtime Unified Communications Community that has been his blogging home for the past three years. Ken's a great guy and a friend and I do wish him all the best in whatever comes next. For now his writing can be found at the Stardust Global Ventures site that he and his wife Sheryl Breuker maintain. He promises to let us know of some of his new ventures in the next little while.
P.S. You don't need to worry about me joining this trend... I own this domain and it's hosted on TypePad, so as long as I keep paying that annual fee.... ;-)
As has been widely reported within the VoIP corner of the blogosphere, the VON brand has now been reborn under the new ownership of Virgo Publishing. After the demise of Pulvermedia and the VON tradeshow in the spring of 2008, many of us wondered if new owners would be found to bring back the show - or was its demise just a sign of the times and the fact that the conference / tradeshow space related to VoIP is already quite crowded. We watched both Jeff Pulver and Carl Ford move on with their lives and new endeavors... and it seemed that maybe VON would just be consigned to the annals of IT trade show history. Or would it?
The answer came earlier this month when Virgo announced the launch of www.von.com as a portal for VoIP news and also announced a new VON Conference and Expo for September 2009 in Miami.
The rebirth is intriguing on a couple of levels. First, with Pulvermedia, "VON" was the conference/tradeshow and magazine brand, but the web portal was Pulvermedia.com. Now, it's all "von.com". The portal, newsletters, tradeshow and everything else. The tag line is also no longer "Voice On the Net" (or later "Voice/Video On the Net") but rather "The Voice of Network Convergence". As Jon Arnold notes, Virgo has ditched Jeff's distinctive purple color theme for a more traditional blue. And the show is also co-located with Virgo's "Channel Partners" show.
It will be interesting to see how the show goes. As several people have written about, there was a certain "magic" around the VON shows, especially in the earlier days. As Carl Ford wrote about the original VON:
Jeff (Pulver) was on the cool apps side, while I brought in the people who wanted to make efficient networks to support them. That to me was VON, but to our audience VON was a lot of things. It was Cool Apps, New Opps, brillant minds and the switch to cheap voice, etc.
I think the challenge the old VON had was that its audience did become extremely fragmented in recent years. Was the show about voice? and cheap voice? was it about carriers? enterprise? was it about video? Or was it about social networking? I think VON tried to be all of those things and in the end that dilution of focus may have helped in its demise. Will the new VON try to focus a bit more? Or will it try to be more?
In this tough economic climate and in a space already filled with shows, I commend anyone who takes up the challenge of mounting a conference / trade show event. The "new" VON is now nine months out... and it will be interesting to see what it evolves into. Right now there's not enough info up on the website to really understand what it will be... but we should see soon...
As Jon explains in a post, he had been blogging at the same location off of Pulver.com since 2005 but recently found that the server was no longer online. He is neither able to post to the server nor are all of his older articles online. This was perhaps inevitable with the continuing changes within "the assets formerly owned by VON / Pulvermedia", but Jon had hung on at that site for as long as he could.
So now he's got a new home and is trying to get the word out to people who used to subscribe to him over there. If you linked to Jon from a "blog roll" or other list of blog sites, he would definitely appreciate you changing your link.
And if you haven't followed Jon in the past, I'd encourage you to check out his writing... Jon has been in the telecom industry a good while and writes a lot about the service provider space. Being in Toronto, he also frequently provides a Canadian perspective on larger telecom issues - and also clues us outside of Canada into telecom-related happenings within Canada.
Now that we see some incredibly powerful peer-to-peer (P2P) technology models emerging in the telephony/communication space, will we see that innovation being challenged or delayed by patent lawsuits?
We no longer develop new software products or services. We continue to market, sell and support our software services. Our strategy also includes seeking strategic business partnerships and distribution channels to leverage our patented technology. All of our business operations are overseen by our sole officer and director, who utilizes third party contractors, as required, to implement the Company’s business strategy.
Though I had not heard of Mangosoft until this article (even though I was living in southern NH during their height), I will say that their technology sounds interesting and indeed in reading Mangosoft's patent 6,647,393 on "Dynamic Directory Service" (either at the US Patents and Trademark Office or over on Google Patents) their invention filed back in 1997 does appear to be essentially what we would call today a peer-to-peer distributed directory service, where "directory" is used in the truly generic form as referencing a list of objects of any form (ex. file descriptors, user info, any pieces of information). [Obvious HUGE caveat - I am NOT a patent lawyer, nor do I play one on TV or the Internet or anywhere else.] From what I know of Skype's architecture, it would seem that they do use a distributed directory service and so it is perhaps no surprise that they eventually settled.
The question is really - is this just the beginning of more lawsuits in the P2P space? MangoSoft's annual report for 2007 shows a debt of $89 million as of December 2006 and the NHBR articles notes that the trend in operating losses has continued with a $680,000 loss in 2008 year-to-date. There is obviously an incentive for them to continue on to try to recoup the ~$90 million that investors have sunk into the company. Beyond this patent, Mangosoft holds several other patents that are related to distributed architectures. It could very well be that this $2.3 million from Skype will be invested now in future lawsuits against other players in the space. Or perhaps not... perhaps it will simply be distributed to some of the existing investors as the operation fades away. I guess that will largely depend upon how much of a solid case to proceed MangoSoft's investors and sole employee believe they have.
While I am definitely sympathetic to inventors who pursued a new technology but were perhaps too far ahead of their time, I must say that I'm not personally excited to see more lawsuits hitting the industry as we see more and more companies (startups, typically) exploring new ways to build communications technologies based on P2P networks. We're in a fascinating time from a network technology point-of-view, as massively distributed networks are now possible and through systems like Skype and BitTorrent we've seen that they are very possible to create. I'd like to hope that this innovation will continue unimpeded by legal battles... although I realize that that's probably an idealistic dream. Even if MangoSoft does not pursue others, over time other larger players will challenge the startups in court should they become more of a competitive threat.
Ah, well, we shall have to see. In the meantime, I guess the good news for Skype is that with their one-time licensing of MangoSoft's patents, they will at least be protected from any further issues in court on these particular patents.
Skype
As has been widely reported within the VoIP corner of the blogosphere, 
My friend and fellow VoIP blogger Jon Arnold (who