Disruptive Telephony

I have to say that it's been rather fascinating to lurk in the "Skype English Blog Chat" public chatroom that was created as part of the beta of Skype 3.0. Many of the Skype employees familiar from the Skype blog pages have been in there, such as Jaanus Kase, and they are taking comments and questions from other Skype 3.0 beta users who have been trying out the beta and then giving the feedback directly in the chat room. Because it's a "persistent" chat room that you always stay in (regardless of whether you are online, offline, or even whether you have the Skype client running at all) until you actually press the "Leave" button, you can always go back in and read the chat history to see what's been going on and what people are saying. I'll give credit to Skype for showing how public chats can be part of an effective beta process. And it's been quite interesting to see the issues that have gone on, as well as the links that people have provided to different things as they have tried them out. I've really only checked into it maybe once a day, although I do have an alert notification set so that any time certain terms are mentioned (such as my name or "security") I get an audible notification and can check it then.

One of the benefits of being one of the 100 folks in the chat room is that you do get some nice advance notice... such as when I just checked the chat room this morning and saw this message:

[9:21:20 AM] Raul Liive says: 3.0 went to Gold just. Get it from www.skype.com

So Skype 3.0 is officially out there... (and I have naturally downloaded a copy). Now we'll see if it works better than the beta where I was having some wacky problem with people's presence not actually showing correctly.