For the Love of Skype
I use a combination of instant messaging and Skype throughout my day to communicate with employees and clients throughout the world. Despite it being somewhat buggy, Cerulean Studio’s Trillian Basic is a free tool I use every day to juggle AIM, MSN, ICQ and IRC discussions. Yet Skype includes a very usable IM chat client, and I am finding fewer and fewer reasons to use these other systems except for client preference.
Skype also has a very usable API (two in fact if you count the COM control) for extending it, and an interesting developer program to package, promote and sell Skype Extras - even within Skype itself. There are a number of useful utilities that integrate with Skype as well as some that I still haven’t figured out. I can’t fathom the value of loading a game into Skype, though it could be game companies that make Skype Extras merely do so to leverage Skype’s sales platform.
But Skype As IM (nor any other IM) does not have all the features I think would make me more productive. I have set an engineer at work at creating a Skype Extra to add those features. In August 2007, the first public alpha or beta will be available for download.
