Disruptive Telephony

Today Skype announced that you could now have up to 150 people in a public chat session. They had quietly rolled this out a bit ago, but I only noticed then because I monitor and participate in a couple of Skype public chats that focus on new releases/features of Skype and development issues.

There does, though, seem to be a continuing puzzle around discrepancies regarding the actual limits.  Ask any 4 people in a Skype public chat to type "/info" on the command line and relay the result... and you'll probably get four very different answers.  I just did that in one public chat (Update: it was the "Skype Developer community public chat") and, as shown in the graphic, showed a total of 201 people in a chat session... with the limit theoretically being 150!  Someone else in the chat did the same command and showed 122 people.  At various times in the past, we've done similar tests and found that there's a very wide range of numbers.

One has to wonder... is this something about the peer-to-peer "cloud" that makes up the Skype infrastructure?  Is this a convergence issue?  i.e. over time the numbers will converge to a common number as the p2p cloud updates?

Very strange.

Update: A contact at Skype indicates that this is a known bug where the count may not reflect people who have left the chat.