Skype is fubar!

Yesterday i downloaded the latest Skype Beta version 3.5.0.158, like always available on a Wednesday by the way! Well, my advice is: DON'T DOWNLOAD IT!

Vincent, a Skype Staff asked me "What kind of "advertising" bothers you in Skype?". OK, Vincent, here you have some more ... go to TOOLS -> OPTIONS -> NOTIFICATIONS -> ALERTS AND MESSAGES!

Although i unticked a long time ago Help, Skype Tips and Promotions, here they are again, with ALERTS! What the heck? Alerts???????

I will leave it "on", just to experience what they will dare to send me, but in the meantime, my answer to Skype Marketing Staff concerning these unwanted advertising messages is:(Nothing personal against you Vincent! ;-)

And i take two weeks holidays, without internet, therefore no Skype, and no blog!

SPAM invasion on my blog

My blog got three comments in the last 24 hours: one "real" comment and two SPAM!

Strange, the first one was full of publicity for PayPal, and full of links to the official PayPall site. The English language was good! I deleted it! CRAP!

The other one has something to do with Skype Prime, isn't linked to Skype, and tries to sell some services. The English language is bad (mine is better, i hope). I took one sentence out of the website:

"our site is just started and may be contains a bugs, which we will fast fix if you will post them via this form".

If i could i would post a lot of bugs to their site! I didn't delete it, because it is too funny! But it is anyhow annoying.

[EDITED] I will apologize here publicly about my comment above concerning PrimeSkype. This was indeed a misunderstanding, due to the receiving of some other BlogSpam. This site, and the message were not spam, and i don't have any problem with somebody not speaking very well English ... i only wanted indeed to ridicule a spammer, and it wasn't :-(

Skype and Business Networks

The last days i had quite some private discussions (through Skype chat) and public comments (see Skype-News or SkypeJournal or my own blog) on the slowing down of the Skype Growth.

One very known Skype user (at least in the small Skype fanatics world) even told me privately, with sorrow in his voice: “MSN style advertising is invading Skype”.

Do they want to beat MSN? Wrong strategy! My kids (21, 19 and 17 years old) continue to use mainly MSN, although they know their father is a fanatic Skype user! It suits their needs, indeed with a lot of fancy stuff. But do they spend money on it? I am almost sure they don’t!

What Skype should have continued to do is focus on business! Because very few business men and professionals use MSN! And they are willing to spend money on professional tools!

OK, integration in the EBay platform is one way to try to catch the attention of some kind of business. But how many professionals use EBay?

Why didn’t they make some agreements or deals with some Business Virtual Networks like Ecademy or Linkedin? Or any other network of Professional adults?

Is it too late? I don’t think so.

Today i read in my (Flemish) Financial Newspaper that linkedin will open its platform to external developers and that from 2008 on users would be able to communicate with each other through internet telephony. I hope the partner is Skype, but i doubt about it!

There still is Ecademy and there are other similar networks!

I got interviewed …

Skype-News is another of several well known Skype Blogs. It is linked to the “alternative” News Site Mathaba.

I was interviewed by them, through … Skype chat of course! You can find the interview on the Mathaba website here.

Or on the Skype-News website here.

The interviewer is also a first hour user of Skype, as you will understand when reading his questions and own comments.

Summer or Final Recession?

I noticed that last night the concurrent users online went below 4 million. Quite normal "night dip" for a Saturday to Sunday night, but hasn't been that low since a long time. This is also an indication that we are entering a summer slowdown, see my explanation on this phenomenon in my post of September last year.

Skype growth is however clearly slowing down!

• We will not reach 10 million concurrent users online before September (my guess), and then it will have been more than 200 days to acquire one additional million. The only time it lasted longer was for the acquisition of the first million concurrent users online: it took 418 days!
• In 2006, Skype grew with 3.84 million concurrent users online (at peak time). Now in the first 6 months of 2007 we only have added 1.22 million users (see the table below)!

So what? Has Skype really reached some “saturation level”?

Classes through Skype

Blogger Mark O’Neil writes an interesting story how Skype can help him to give classes in the English language to people around the world and how he can get a fee for this. Read the story here. Not new, other people already blogged on this, but interesting to read the advantages of it!

And his question how to share a PowerPoint presentation online with the student in real-time has also an answer: UNYTE.

How many Skype users?

Through SkypeJournal i downloaded the presentation of Lester Madden, the Skype Platform Manager.

I found an interesting number: they claim they have 196 million users.

This is a false statement as i explained in the past in SkypeJournal in “How many users does Skype have today?”. They should replace the word Users by User Names or Skype Accounts.

I will repeat my statements of that article … some Skype names are not used at all for any of the following reasons (non exclusive list)::

• lost passwords, and therefore inaccessible username
• tests, and abandoned use of the name
• spare usernames, registered for future use (I have several!)
• the owner of the username died (yes, this also happens!)
• the person switched to another VoIP tool
• the person registered a temporary name for a temporary past situation.

Here my updated table, with the number provided by Lester Madden (rounded numbers).One interesting fact however: each 3 downloads generates one new username. Perhaps we can say, out of 3 downloads, two are upgrades, one is a new POTENTIAL user. Compared to last year, this hasn’t changed significantly.

But the question stays open: HOW MANY REAL REGULAR USERS DOES SKYPE HAVE NOW?

My guess: Less than 50 million!

I got blogtagged

I got blogtagged by Ike then by Jörg!
OK, here i go ...

1. In 1981, after graduating as an Engineer, my father gave me a “reward” of 10.000 Belgian franks (€ 250 – but with inflation this is probably more than € 500 now) and i went on my own to Iceland with my rucksack, sleeping bag, a stove, my tent … very beautiful country, lovely people. And … i met an Australian guy there, and we travelled, hiked and camped a week together. This guy had been travelling for 3 years without interruption mainly in Asia and Europe. I thought: WOW!
2. In 1983, after working as a researcher at the University, i took my rucksack, bought a one-way ticket to Lima, Peru, and started my “World Tour”, hereby copying the idea of my Australian friend, with whom i kept contact. No internet, no Skype, therefore i phoned about monthly to my parents. In the local phone companies i had to ask how much the call would cost, estimate how many minutes (and dollars) i wanted to spend, pay before calling (like Skype!), wait for the operator to make the connection with my parents, and then we talked x minutes until my credit was gone. I took my time, and visited Peru, Bolivia, Chile (Pinochet was still there), Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay (In Asunción i played chess during one month with an American guy) and Brasil. I even crossed the border between Paraguay and Bolivia with smugglers, for my second visit to that country (and climbed a 6000 m mountain with Israeli friends). I stopped travelling after one and a half year after meeting my future Brazilian (and now almost former) wife on a beach! My trip didn’t last as long as the Australian friend however. But, it still is the best and most enriching period of my life!
3. I’ve lived and worked as an expat in Ecuador (1987-1990), where two of my 3 sons were born, and also in Tunisia (1992-1995): without internet, long before the Skype era, so phone calls were expensive. I remember they installed next to their TELEX machine their first FAX machine at the factory shortly after i arrived in Ecuador in 1987: WOW, we could send a handwritten message or a drawing! My best Ecuadorian friend (Carlos) and my best Tunisian colleague (Adel) are now in my Skype contacts.
4. Yes, I smoke, quitting for several days, weeks or
   
   months and starting again. Not good for my health and with negative consequences on my sport, i know. I drink alcohol too (mainly wine and beer, sometimes cachaça, when i have it), and i eat everything that other people dare to eat, even poisonous Finnish mushrooms when prepared correctly.
5. If nothing “wrong” happens in the meantime, in July i’ll go hiking and camping in the Swiss Alps with my Friend Fabio … the Australian guy: we made the appointment through Skype!

Now, whom to tag? Difficult, most people i know have been tagged. I will however also tag somebody who was tagged also by another person, but perhaps this will "awake" his blog. Here they are: Mark O'Neil, Kevin Delaney, Jan Geirnaert, Hudson Barton, Johan

Call forwarding = € or $

You can forward your Skype calls when you are offline or away. And ... it can be completely free! Continue reading ...
Follow the next steps in the Skype client:
TOOLS -> OPTIONS -> CALLS -> CALL FORWARDING
It says “You will need $$$$ to forward calls”?

If you click further … -> CALL FORWARDING OPTIONSIt says now “enter phone number” and “you need to purchase Skype credit”

This is NOT true! Skype forgets to mention that you can also forward calls to another Skype account, and this is COMPLETELY FREE! Just put the Skype account name in the field where you would put a telephone number!

What is this good for? Two - among many other - possibilities:

• you have a computer downstairs and another upstairs, each running different accounts; you can forward calls from one computer to another.
• you have a Skype account at work and another at home. You could forward your home calls to your work account.

I think Skype should change the messages in the Skype client: “You can forward calls to phone numbers, voicemails or other Skype accounts”!

SMS setup = €

Some days ago Skype warned me that on one of my spare accounts my Skype Credit balance would expire (because i didn't use it for almost 6 months).

I had some 13 € cents left, and i had an SMS to send to one of my sons, so i thought: “ok, lets spend the money to that”. But i wanted my son to “identify me by my mobile number”! Therefore I had to go through the following steps in the Skype client:

TOOLS -> OPTIONS -> CHATS & SMS -> SMS SETTINGS -> VERIFY YOUR MOBILE NUMBER -> “enter your mobile number” -> "wait for a code send to you by SMS" -> "enter the code" -> READY

This worked as a charm, within seconds i received the code! Great!

Then i went to the SMS window of the Skype client, prepared the SMS and pushed on the button SEND and ...This was strange: € 0.13 credit left, the message costs € 0.106 to send and message not sent because “not enough credit left”. I looked twice, then a third time, tried to understand, tried again to send the SMS, etc. NO WAY!

Then after some minutes i indeed saw that my credit had gone down to € 0.02. I signed in to my account page to check if the SMS to my son had been charged for, and then i understood:The mobile number showed here is my own mobile number. Skype charged me the price of an SMS for sending me the “code”. And indeed, it is announced in the set-up window that i would be charged the standard price for an SMS, but i didn’t notice it! Therefore my fault!

But anyway: some improvement work for Skype! The update of the credit left is too slow compared to the speed of spending the money!

Update Skype Forum Growth

The number of usernames registered on the Skype Forum is still increasing, as can be seen on the graph below, but less fast in my opinion.

Good? Or bad? Difficult to say. Indeed quite some people reach the forum because they have some problems (technical, payment, spam, developer stuff, …). And slowing growth could mean less bugs in Skype. On the other hand the concurrent users online isn’t growing that fast anymore, so this could be another reason.

Not all visitors come to the forum with problems: there are also some interesting discussions going on on wanted features, evolution of Skype, competing products, contests, etc.

There are subsections in other languages (Japanese, Italian, German and Spanish). Although i know that not everybody speaks English, i somehow deplore that there are subsections. It has always been allowed to post in your own language on the forum, so why create subsections? It is probably easier for the forum moderators.

Let us convert the graph above in registered usernames per day …

The red dots (and curve) represents the mean new usernames per day on a monthly basis. In May 2007 (last month) 337 new users were added per day. There were some higher peaks (in January almost 400 new users per day).

The blue lines (and peaks) are some intermediary data that i calculated. As explained in a previous post (see here) most of the blue peaks were due to SpamBots.

Conclusion: Forum users are still increasing, although, in my opinion there is a clear slowdown, probably due to the slower growth of Skype users.

Jaanus out, Ike in!

Again one of the eldest Skype staff leaving the company! IMHO there are not many left from the beginning ages. Why? Ordinary career moves or something else?

Jaanus Kase was the main Blogger of Skype, and was also Root Administrator on the Skype Forums. In the whole beginning his Forum Username was Terminus, don’t ask me why.

In my opinion he was a really important person for the “marketing” of Skype. And, i loved the fact that he always permitted criticism on Skype in the forums, and even discussions about competing products. Yes … very clever to listen to the Skype Users and what they say about Jajah, VoIPStunt and others!

We will miss him. But i guess he will continue to provide us his views on his personal blog or here in miscrandom.com. Good luck with your Master studies Jaanus!

From a “very good source”, i know that Ike Roelfsema (see my previous post in this blog) will take over a big part of his job. I happen to know Ike already quite a long time (i however never met her … i cyber-know her or skype-chat-and-call-know her).

Good choice … she is a nice person, and it is probably a gift for her to be able to combine her Skype-hobby-passion with a job!

Congratulations and good luck Ike!

Did Ike become Skype Staff?

Yesterday i was looking on the Skype Forum to the profiles of the Skype Staff members, and then i saw this … (see picture). Ike Roelfsema, is a Dutch Woman Skyper living in Friesland, the Northern part of The Netherlands. She became (like myself, but later ;-) Super User on the Skype Forum – the first woman by the way - then Moderator, and now Root Administrator.

Strange, i thought all Root Administrators were Skype Staff?

Congratulations Ike, although i don’t know how long she already is Root Administrator.

1 million Skype allocations

My Skype account allocated me some Skype credit some days ago (May 25):

• Amount allocated: 1.95 €
• Allocation number: 1007895
• Purchase order number: 95515924

What is a Skype allocation? It is Skype credit that you transfer from your account to other people through the Skype for Business Control Panel.

Is that a milestone? I don’t know! An allocation on its own doesn’t generate money!

In the meantime the number of Skype purchase orders will reach 100 million in the next days. This is indeed a milestone, purchase orders generate money!

All of them? Not really as explained in my previous post on this topic of October 21, 2006.

Quite strange indeed that an allocation gets two numbers:

1. A purchase order number and …
2. An allocation number

But this also means that not all “purchase orders” as defined by Skype are equivalent to income generation as it includes also:

• vouchers
• gifts (from Skype to some of its customers),
• allocations
• cancelled or rejected purchases
• balance expirations
• etc.

SkypeFind Brussels

This afternoon i played around with SkypeFind. Still way for improvement …

Believe me or not, there are 25 restaurants listed in Brussels.

Do the test yourself: search “What: restaurant – Where: Brussels – Find listings in: Belgium”.

OOPS! Only 9 listed!

Do the same search but replace Brussels with Brussel or Bruxelles, here are the results:

• restaurant - Brussels: 9 found
• restaurant - Brussel: 11 found
• restaurant - Bruxelles: 14 found

The second search listed all the same, and two more.
The third search listed 14 different ones. So, 11 + 14 = 25 and i am not a liar ;-)

How come? In Dutch we say Brussel, in French we say Bruxelles, and in English, Brussels. Most people add a listing with the name of the city in one language, and when you make a search it only lists those locations with the exact spelling!

How to circumvent it? I listed my own business, and did put the location like this:

• City: Gent - Ghent – Gand
• Area: Oostakker (this is a suburb of Ghent)

And yes, now when i search for it, whatever of the above names i use as a search criterion (including the “area”) it finds it!

I have a car, therefore if i want to find a restaurant in my province (field “Region” in the SkypeFind database), and i put East Flanders as search location, it finds nothing. If i leave the city location blank it finds all the restaurants in Belgium, but some are really too far.

While registering my business, i hoped to find a field to put my Skype account name. NO WAY! Skype to Skype calls will always be free, but no way to put a Skype ID, business is business! Call your favourite businesses with SkypeOut! So, is Skype a TELCO?

Then i wondered if i could edit the listing of somebody else. Ooh yes! I saw that restaurant Ter Toren was listed in the city “Oostakker”. This is wrong, it should be Gent, so i changed it, and did put (like for my own business) Gent – Ghent – Gand. I could even add some more keywords. Could I have added “sex”, or “never hallal food” or something like that? I could even change the name of the business! What if somebody does that with the name of my business?

Therefore, some improvement work to do for Skype:

1. Make the search “language independent” by making a database of postcodes linked to a name (for instance).
2. Let the user refine the geographical zone he wants to search in
3. Have a field for the Skype ID of the business
4. Let Business Owner have exclusive rights on some fields (name, telephone number, etc.) or give them at least the possibility to “take control over it”, but I guess Skype marketers already thought about it: perhaps another way to make money in the future?
5. Have an input for the geographical coordinates of the location, and link this with some route planner or Google Earth.

Yes, still work to do for Skype!

Squirrel

Yesterday i discovered (with some help ;-) the latest hidden emoticon:

= (heidy)

And for those who are new to Skype, here are the other hidden ones:

= (mooning)

= (finger)

= (bandit)

= (drunk)

= (ci)

= (toivo)

= (rock)

= (headbang)

= (poolparty)

= (swear)

= (bug)

= (fubar)

= (tmi)

Some explanations:
(toivo) = Toivo Annus is the name of a former Skype Staff member. He was head of engineering. His "signature" on the Skype Forum was "Dog ate my headset"!

(heidy) = is probably also a Skype Staff member or at least somebody related with Skype. I found this phrase on the Skype Blogs: "I just got off a video test call from a Lufthansa flight over the Atlantic on Boeing Connexion wifi service. I saw Heidy waving to me from the cafeteria in Tallinn."

(kate) = is an alternative to a known and shown emoticon. Try it! But who is this? There was a Skype Staff member called Kate. You can find her 3 posts under the Skype Forum name "Skype-Kate_"

(london) = is also an alternative to a known and shown emoticon. Quite funny!

Suzuki & Skype

About one week ago i received the “happylife” magazine send by Suzuki Belgium to subscribers (mainly Suzuki owners of course).

Surprise, surprise … on page 22 there is an article about “Free phoning through the Internet”.

They use the generic term VoIP, and of course they mention Skype (www.skype.com) first, but they also mention and give links of the following alternatives:

• Wengo (www.wengo.fr)
  
• Jajah (www.jajah.com)
  
• net2phone (www.net2phone.com)
  

The link with Suzuki in the article? I don’t know, not one word about it!

I already pretended the growth of Skype was slowing down, and apparently one of the reasons is the fierce competition since some months in the VoIP market. When even companies who have no links with the telecom business already begin to write about VoIP and to mention competing products, it really means there are good alternatives to Skype!

The difference will be made through the additional services each solution offers: video, file transfer, earning money through your calls, desktop sharing, price differentiation, encryption, open standards, etc.

Download speed Down

In my last post i mentioned a quite unexpected increase in downloads of the Skype client, and gave some possible explanations for it. However, i think now the explanation should be looked for somewhere else, and i didn’t find any …

Why? Well, as sudden as the increase started, as sudden it disappeared, look on the Graph below. The slope of the (blue) download curve did bent down dramatically on May 10.

On May 9 the new Skype version 3.2 was released (out of beta version) so even this is no explanation, because here we should expect a surge in downloads, as a lot of people would and have upgraded now!

We are again at download speeds around 500 downloads per minute. What happened?

(the graph is adapted screenshot of nyanyan.to)

Download speed increase

I don’t check it as often as some months ago, but some minutes ago i checked the speed of downloads and i registered 1228 downloads/minute. Probably it has been even higher in previous days. In the last months the speed was almost always way below 1000 downloads/minute.

Why?

I saw several possible reasons:

• On April 25: 10 free SkypeOut minutes for Italian Skypers (why not for Lybia?)
• On April 26: 10 free SkypeOut minutes for UK Skypers (why not for Pakistan?)
• On April 27: 10 free SkypeOut minutes for German Skypers (why not for Burundi?)
• On April 27: 10 free SkypeOut minutes for French Skypers (why not for Belgium?)
• Until May 8: half price for SMS to some countries
• Or is it the success of Skype Extras?

I already blogged on the fact that Skype only gives gifts to the bigger countries (see link here, quite frustrating for the others, not because of the amount of the gift (10 minutes = 17 eurocents or about 12 US$ cents) but the principle!

May 1st, less Skypers

May 1st was in quite a lot of countries a Holiday (Celebration of the Working Class, or Workers Day, or Labour Day, or whatever). My Dutch neighbours do not seem to have a working class, because they don’t celebrate it!

For people who know my number analysis this will of course not be a surprise, but when major countries have a day off (and on May 1st it were several major countries), the number of concurrent users online goes down compared to other days. The same is valid for Saturday and Sunday, see the red curve on the graph below, taken from the Japanese site nyanyan.to.

When you look closely at the Friday before the weekend, the number of online users is also lower than on Thursday, probably because some Muslim countries have their weekend.

Strange also: it seems the download servers for the Skype client were down for a 48 hours period mainly over the weekend, see the flat portion of the blue curve above.

Witch hunting?

Skype continues to force domain names with the name “Skype” in it to close down their site or change the name.

In the past i saw some early developers or even supporters of Skype changing their name after pressure from the lawyers of Skype. And most of them stopped developing, because Skype took away their business idea.

Some examples …

• Video4Skype: the first video conferencing tool for Skype
• VSkype: the second video conferencing tool for Skype

I used both, and they were really added value for Skype, but they disappeared …

Some days ago, Jan from Malaysia was obliged to remove his blog on Skype called Skype-Watch.

Funny and I feel sorrow. Jan has in my opinion the best blog on Skype, followed by the “older” and more famous SkypeJournal. Skype Journal was never threatened like that i guess. And Jan has been a very big promoter of Skype.

Skype Journal also reported about this “incident” some days ago, and in a very surprised way. They don’t understand why! Perhaps they are the next victim? I don’t think so, i think there is some kind of “unwritten” agreement between Skype and Skype Journal.

Phil Wolff says: “My take: Sharma (the lawyer threatening Jan Geirnaert), didn't consult with Skype's PR or marketing communications team before composing her email”. Well, I think Phil is wrong here: Jan isn’t mentioned anymore in the “Friends of Skype” list in the Skype blog! So, there was conversation between the lawyers and marketing!

It is true that Jan has criticised Skype several times, especially concerning some security issues, but so do I, and so does Skype Journal (but, IMHO less than in the past!). It is true (in view of the ads on the blog) that Jan earns probably some “Google” dimes with his website, but so does Skype Journal.

If you want to continue to enjoy the blogging of Jan, look here: www.voip-watch.com.