August 2012 archive

IPv6 Friday: IPv6 for beginners

What are some good steps for someone just beginning with IPv6? Over on his IPv6 Friday site, Olle Johansson published an “IPv6 for beginners” post today that provides a nice checklist for individuals who want to get started.

Olle’s primary focus is on suggesting you set up an IPv6 tunnel so that you can get IPv6 into your home network – even if your local Internet Service Provider does not support IPv6.    I can say myself that this works great as it is how I get IPv6 connectivity into my home office in Keene, New Hampshire.  As Olle notes, there are now a number of different IPv6 tunnel providers. Hurricane Electric (HE) and SixXS are probably the best known out there, but others exist too.

Olle also answers a number of other questions and points to a number of resources out there for learning more about IPv6, including Deploy360. (Thanks, Olle!)

It’s good to see more tutorial info like this out there and I do hope it encourages more people to try out getting IPv6 into their local networks.

P.S. If you live in the US or Canada, this is probably a long weekend for the Labo(u)r Day holiday… if you need a geeky distraction, why not try getting IPv6 set up on your home network? :-)

Skype Celebrates 9 Years of Disrupting Telecom, But What Comes Next?

Nine years ago today, August 29, 2003, the first version of Skype was made publicly available. Now in 2012 Skype celebrates it's 9th birthday - and first birthday as part of Microsoft... and it's still disrupting telecommunications.

Four years ago on Skype's 5th birthday I wrote at great length about how Skype has changed telecommunications and last year I wrote a retrospective as well - both of those posts still stand... Skype has only added more capabilities over the time. Skype is still one of the only applications that I can say I personally use each and every day. It's critical to what I do.

As I look back on my last year of writing about Skype, I'd note that they've finally gotten the app to work more similarly across operating systems, introduced amazing video quality, crossed over 40 million simultaneous users, made yet another attempt at a developer program and continually improved the Skype-on-mobile-device experience. Skype has also added a deeper Facebook integration, embedded Skype into more TV and other consumer devices, rolled out Skype on Windows Phone and continued to improve their video offerings.

But what comes next?

What will we be writing about on Skype's 10th birthday next year?

Jim Courtney captures this well in a post today on the theme of "Whither Skype?" The whole post is worth a read, but I'll highlight one paragraph in particular:

Where does Skype play a role going forward? Beyond its inherent calling features within Skype clients, Skype definitely provides the infrastructure for free chat, voice and video conversations. In one sense we have seen that through their relationship with Facebook. Besides its ongoing development and innovation on mobile devices, Skype will introduce opportunities for experience sharing into several Microsoft products. Skype is incrementally improving its mobile offerings every few months on multiple vendors’ devices. Its primary focus will remain on real time communications; the question is where does one want to launch and receive a “sharing experience” in the course of our ongoing social networking activities?

The whole "social interaction" is a key one... but let me expand on a couple of points here.

Old-School Telecom Fights Back

Skype's greatest challenge going forward is one that comes from its success - by most any measure, Skype is destroying the revenue for international long-distance. Telegeography released a report back in January showing the incredible growth of Skype calling versus that of traditional carriers:

A study prior to that in January 2011 had estimated that 25% of all international calling was via Skype... and the growth in this more recent chart can only mean that number has gone even higher.

UPDATE: Digging into the executive summary for Telegeography's latest report shows that they estimate the total global international long distance market in 2011 to be 438 billion minutes. Of that, Skype accounts for 145 billion minutes - or 33% of all international calls. Yes, 33%!

I was concerned that the 438 billion minutes did not include Skype minutes, but the caption to Figure 7 (which shows the 483 billion) on page 9 states:

Notes: Total traffic reflects TDM and VoIP telephone traffic transported by carriers, and international PC-toPC Skype traffic. Traffic from Skype-to-phone service is included in the telephone traffic totals.

Separately, Phil Wolff from Skype Journal indicated that he had some time earlier contacted Telegeography about this question and they had confirmed to him that Skype numbers were included in the total figures.

UPDATE #2: I was alerted that back in January 2012, Skype published a blog post about these Telegeography numbers in which they state that the Skype-to-Skype calling is NOT included in the "total" number and so now I am not sure precisely what to believe. If it not included, then the total number of international long distance minutes would be 583 billion, of which Skype's traffic would represent 25% of all global traffic. Still an amazing figure! I am going to see if I can contact someone at Telegeography to get a verification of the numbers.

I can say that from personal experience - I never make international calls using the legacy phone network. I use Skype for all those calls... either from my laptop or increasingly from my mobile devices.

In fact, at this point in time if you are NOT using Skype for international calling, I would say that is probably only because you don't have the requisite access to bandwidth or equipment... or simply aren't aware of Skype. (Or yes, you could be using one of the other competing services appearing.)

The traditional telcos, of course, are not happy about this. Particularly the ones associated with national governments for whom all those international long distance charges constituted a MAJOR source of national revenue.

They would like to get back into the revenue stream and force Skype and all the other "Over-The-Top (OTT)" service providers to somehow start paying them again. They would like to put this whole Internet and VoIP genie back into the proverbial bottle and return to the "good old days" when all revenue went through their channels.

All this pent-up anger and frustration with declining revenue is heading toward the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in December in Dubai where many of the traditional carriers are attempting to use the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) as a vehicle to reign in the OTT apps like Skype. They (through various governments) want to see the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) rewritten to force OTT apps to pay.

It's going to be a mess.

Just look at all the WCIT-related news stories. I certainly hope that sanity will prevail and that the Internet will remain much as it is today... but there are no guarantees and these next few months are going to be critical for the future of the Internet, for telecommunications and for companies like Skype.

The outcome of all of that may have a lot to do with what the future holds for Skype.

WebRTC/RTCWEB and Baking Voice Into The Fabric Of The Web

Another challenge for Skype will be the ongoing work of the "WebRTC/RTCWEB initiative" to essentially bake voice/video/chat communication into the fabric of the web. (Learn more about WebRTC/RTCWEB if you aren't aware of it.)

Skype hasn't really had a real challenger to its predominance as the major voice/video/chat provider for the Internet. Skype's super-simple installation and ability to "just work" has made it near ubiquitous. Add in the network effect of now having such a huge user base and it's clear why so many people use Skype.

BUT ... as much as there are many people using Skype, there are MANY more who use web browsers!

What if voice/video/chat gets moved into the web browser? What if you can go into Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer and initiate all your calls and chats from within your browser? What if you can do all this from your mobile web browsers, too?

What if you don't need to have a separate application any longer? What if you can just do all your "real-time communications" (RTC) through your web browsers?

Boom.

That is exactly what the WebRTC/RTCWEB initiative is all about - putting the building blocks for RTC down into web browsers so that any web developer can work on building RTC applications.

In theory, many of these applications could reduce the need for Skype. Now, in reality, you still have the "directory" issue in that you need to find the other party with whom you want to communicate. Skype provides that easy directory. But look what Google is doing with its central accounts... look what Apple is doing with their Apple ID... there are a lot of players out there also building directory infrastructures. (Plus social services like Twitter and Facebook are also getting in that game.)

Now, Skype has been involved with WebRTC/RTCWEB from the initial meetings. Skype employs a number of the people who have been contributors along the way. Many have seen this as a possible way for Skype to roll out its own web-based Skype client and make that even more ubiquitous.

But Skype/Microsoft is no longer following the majority path of the overall initiative. They recently released their "CU-RTC-Web" proposal which deviates in some key ways from the current WebRTC/RTCWEB plans and proposals.

Will the divergence be resolved? Will there be a common solution? Or will Skype/Microsoft go on their own path? Will we see incompatible implementations? Will WebRTC/RTCWEB open up the possibility of some true challengers to Skype's dominance? Or will it wind up not delivering on the full promise of browser-based RTC?

Time will tell... but this next year will be a fascinating one.

The Microsoft Effect

Skype also faces the good and bad news that it is now part of Microsoft. On the one hand, there is a huge potential for Skype expansion into enterprises (a market Microsoft knows extremely well) and certainly some interesting synergies with Microsoft Lync and other products.

On the other hand, Skype is no longer the scrappy little Estonian startup that we used to write about. It's now part of the mainstream corporate world. It has matured - but with that maturity comes the need to maintain legacy compatibility, to make sure new things don't break old things, etc., etc.

As several of us wrote about back at the beginning of 2012, Skype has the real chance of becoming "boring", i.e. not as exciting to write about. As I said in my post:

Instead of the little company taking on "the Man", Skype has now become "the Man".

Add to that the fact that in 2012 Microsoft is not really seen in the larger media as a bastion of innovation.

Skype's success may lead it to be less exciting to write about and talk about - or not... we'll have to see what they are able to do within the new world of Microsoft.

It All Comes Down To #$@%$! Batteries

It perhaps goes without saying that the future of so much of our communication is all about mobile and the use of smartphones, tablets, etc. As I wrote at the end of my recent post about Skype's photo sharing for iOS, Skype would love to see us just keep Skype running all the time on our mobile devices. They say as much in their blog post:

We've also improved the overall performance of Skype's mobile apps. We've made them less battery hungry when running in the background, so you'll now be able to answer Skype calls throughout the day when they come in. And, as you'll be able to keep Skype open, you can respond to or send IMs to friends and colleagues all day long.

This is their mobile challenge. I do NOT keep Skype running on my mobile devices for precisely this reason. Doing so has destroyed my battery life in the past. (In fairness, I've not yet tested this new version.)

I do, though, keep other apps running on my iOS devices and so I receive notifications and messages via those services.

Skype's mission is to get their mobile app to the point where people do keep it there running all the time.

The Social Impact

Finally, the "social" aspect is one challenge that Skype certainly faces. There is the ongoing reality that:

much of our "messaging" has moved to "social networks".

We use Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn and a hundred other sites (and maybe App.net soon) to share our messaging. On our mobile devices we've also added in other OTT apps like WhatsApp, Viber, TuMe and again a hundred others.

We're interacting in communities of "friends".

And we're not "talking" as much as we used to - in either voice or video. Oh, sure, we definitely are talking... and Skype's video usage, in particular, is no doubt increasing as more people discover Skype and also as Skype gets embedded in more video devices.

But overall the trend I'm certainly seeing is for people to interact and exchange messages in more text-based mechanisms... and again primarily through "social" services.

The question for Skype is how they best play in that space.

I don't do half of the Skype chats I used to do because many of the people with whom I might have IM'd via Skype now contact me via Facebook or Twitter. With Skype's Photo Sharing for iOS, I would honestly never think to use Skype for sharing photos... not just because of the battery issue but also because that's what I do with Facebook or Instagram or even Twitter. Not Skype.

The Facebook integration with Skype was an interesting move and I could see it for enabling real time communication from within Facebook... but I personally don't see the Skype application as a place to read Facebook updates and interact with them. I do that through Facebook's website - or through Facebook's mobile apps or other apps like Flipboard or Tweetdeck.

Even as a platform for exchanging status updates, Skype's apps no longer work like they used to. In Skype versions prior to 5.x (on a Mac, anyway), it was easy to see where you could enter your "mood message" and so it was common to update that somewhat frequently. The 5.x client brought us a "stream" interface so that we could see the updates from others - but then in a rather bizarre move they made it harder for you to update your own message! As a result I know I hardly ever update my message now. (and usually it's when someone pings me to tell me that the existing message is out-of-date!)

Skype's challenge is to figure out how they fit into the social ecosystem. Do they attempt to become the real-time communications infrastructure for social networks? So that when you do want to move your interaction to a voice or video call you can do so over Skype? Do they try to open up their massive platform to be a social infrastructure? Do they join the rest of the players in trying to be "the place" where you read your social status updates?

It's not clear what Skype will choose, but if they don't choose some path the continued rise of social interaction may render them less of a player as other players emerge.

In The End...

Skype... as Skype celebrates its 9th birthday, it's good to pause and think about all the incredible disruption they have caused. Few companies in recent history have done as much to shake the very foundations of the ways in which we communicate. Recently, my three-year-old daughter said to me:

Daddy, when I grow up I want to fly away on an airplane so that you can Skype me!

Earlier in her life when I called on the regular phone line she would look at the phone handset trying to understand why she couldn't see my video. She has grown up with video communications just being "normal" ... and with the idea that you would just talk to a computer screen.

Skype has done all of that, becoming a verb in the process.

Congrats - and happy birthday - to all the folks at Skype. As noted above, their tenth year is full of challenges... lots of crossroads and choices lie ahead, not all of them under Skype's control... but I look forward to seeing where we are next August as Skype crosses that 10-year milestone.

We do, indeed, live in interesting times.


UPDATE: Jennifer Caukin at Skype has published a post on Skype's blog with a timeline infographic outlining the growth of Skype over these past 9 years.

UPDATE #2: Phil Wolff is out with a humorous look at what the next 9 years of Skype could bring. Not sure about all of his predictions, but some are certainly fun to think about... :-)


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Video: 4 Days of World IPv6 Launch Statistics in 165 Seconds

The good folks over at RIPE NCC recently published a video showing 4 days of IPv6 connectivity statistics in under 3 minutes. RIPE NCC’s Rene Wilhem goes into great detail in the companion blog post about how they measured the 60 sites included in the survey and some of their observations. As you start watching the video, it is June 4, 2012, and a number of sites have not yet enabled IPv6. As June 6 (World IPv6 Launch) approaches, you see more sites going “green” and as the video continues you see more and more sites having good IPv6 connectivity:

It’s interesting to note some of the ongoing connectivity issues, particularly from one of the observation points. Rene Wilhelm highlights these trends:

  • Most of the HTTP failures (red cells) are clustered in a few rows and columns. This indicates the majority of problems occurred at the edge of the network, close to a small number of participating websites and vantage points.
  • From the evening of 4 June onwards, no single participant or vantage point shows 100% failures for a prolonged time. Apart from the occasional short lived incident, every site and vantage point had at least some partial success with HTTP over IPv6.
  • Generally, things improve over time. Significantly fewer HTTP failures are seen towards the end of the movie

It’s great to see these kind of measurements coming out of RIPE NCC and we definitely appreciate the visualization, too. The RIPE NCC blog post goes into further detail and is well worth a read. Kudos to the RIPE NCC team for undertaking these measurements – and reporting – as it is definitely a help to all of us!

Over 760,000 .NL Domains Now Signed With DNSSEC

The Netherlands now leads the world in terms of DNSSEC-signed domains with over 760,000 .NL domains signed with DNSSEC. A tweet from SIDN, the operator of the .NL domain, clued us in to this milestone this morning. You may recall us writing about the .NL growth back in early July when the number of domains was cruising up towards 100,000… now about 7 weeks later the the growth is approaching 8X that number:

DNSSEC growth in dot NL domain

As shown in the graph from the PowerDNSSEC team, the .NL growth has surpassed other domains that have been promoting DNSSEC such as .SE, .BR and .CZ.  It has also, sadly, eclipsed the number of DNSSEC-signed .COM domains.

Kudos to the SIDN team for their efforts to encourage DNSSEC adoption within their registrars and hosting providers. We look forward to seeing them pass the million domain mark soon!

P.S. If you want more information about how to sign your own domain using DNSSEC, check out our instructions for several registrars.

Video: IPv6 addressing and why ISPs give out such huge blocks of IPv6 addresses

What are all the numbers, letters and slashes about in an IPv6 address? Why do ISPs give out such huge allocations of IPv6 addresses just for a home network? Couldn’t we use smaller address blocks? Are we setting ourselves up for future issues? Or does this all make sense?

By way of our friends at Team ARIN we learned of an amusing video produced last year by the folks at Softlayer to answer these precise questions for their customers about IPv6. In the video, Kevin Hazard and “Phil” take you through a Prezi animation that explains exactly how big IPv6 addresses really are, how they are structured and how they are given out. In their companion blog post, they explain the motivation for the video and a bit more information.

The video is about 15 minutes long and in that time gives a quite solid understanding of IPv6 addressing. Kudos to the Softlayer team for making the video available!

FIR #666 – 08/27/12 – For Immediate Release

Shel's in Brazil; Giovanni Rodriguez interview is up; Quick news: Facebook launches Edge Studio for agencies, will Google shutter FeedBurner?, new Instagram features could lure brands, add your social media marketing tip to GaggleAmp; Ragan promo; News That Fits: McKinsey study validates business need to adopt social technologies, Dan York's report, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, new adoptions of influence scores, listener comments, U.S. seeks regulatory comments via social comment site, TemboSocial promo, social media and the Las Vegas code; music from Stereomaniacs; and more.

SIPNOC 2012 Photos Now Available On Flickr

At this year's SIP Network Operators Conference (SIPNOC) on June 25-27, 2012 in Reston, VA, I was shooting photos of the various presenters as well as trying to take some shots that captured the general feel of the excellent event. As with shooting any event, I find the actual taking photos to be the insanely easy part... it is the curation of the photos that takes the longest amount of time. Over the past bit, though, I finally was able to reduce the 500+ photos I shot down to a meaningful set and I've now posted the SIPNOC 2012 photos up to Flickr:

Sipnoc2012 photos

A special thanks to Spencer Dawkins who took some shots of me speaking.

I've licensed them all under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license so that they can be used by others. If you're in the photos and want an original, you can download them from Flickr... and you're also welcome to contact me if you have any issues downloading a file.

SIPNOC 2012 was a great event and kudos to the SIP Forum for making the event happen! I'm looking forward to next year's event!


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Yea! Facebook’s iPhone/iPad App Finally Stops Sucking!

Hooray! With an update today Facebook's iOS app for the iPhone and iPad finally stops being so terrible! Lately using the application on my iPad was an exercise in futility outside of just simple likes or comments. If I ever tried to follow a link, this was what usually greeted me:

Facebook ipad before

It would sit there and sit there and sit there... and often what I would do was hit the arrow in the upper right to open the link up in Safari on the iPad. The link would typically load almost immediately in Safari and I'd be reading the page. Then when I flipped back to the Facebook app I would just hit the back arrow to go back to reading the stream.

The ONLY reason I really continued to use the Facebook app at all was because it was easier to use than the straight Facebook website when it came to liking posts. In using the website on the iPad I often found I had to tap the "Like" link twice to make it work - or not. It was inconsistent, where the app generally always worked.

I just dreaded having to open a link in the app.

And then today with little fanfare outside of an update from Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook released version "5.0" of the iOS app through the AppStore:

Facebook update

Upon learning about the new release from my own Facebook stream of updates (thanks, Dameon!), I updated the app on both my iPhone and iPad and was immediately pleased by the performance improvement.

MUCH faster! Kudos to the Facebook team for making the application actually pleasant to use!

In a quick bit of usage there seem to be many other tweaks to the UI. One I found particularly pleasing was a numerical notification of new updates since the last time you refreshed the feed:

Facebook ipad new stories

I haven't yet used it enough to find new changes I dislike... I'm sure there may be a few... but at least the application now is much faster and more responsive.

Thanks, Facebook team, for getting this new release out!

And if you have the FB app installed on your iOS device, head on over to the AppStore to get the update!

What do you think? Are there still parts of the mobile experience that are broken? Will this new release make you want to use the app again? Or will you stick to the website?


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SIP Forum Formally Launches “SIP Over IPv6″ Task Group

SIP ForumWant to help make sure that the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) can work well over IPv6?  Want to help move the Voice-over-IP (VoIP) industry forward into the world of IPv6?

If so, you can join the newly created “SIP Over IPv6 Task Group” within the SIP Forum. Yesterday in a message to the SIP Forum’s IPv6 mailing list, John Berg, one of the co-chairs of the new effort, announced the formal creation of the task group and put out a call for participants in the groups first teleconference on Thursday, September 13, 2012, at 11:00am US Eastern time.

The charter for the SIP over IPv6 Task Group identifies seven tasks:

  1. Evaluate the current status of SIP over IPv6 based on standardization work in the IETF and other standard’s bodies or industry forums.
  2. Evaluate current technologies and strategies for IPv4/IPv6 co-existence and identify impacts of these technologies on SIP-based networks and the user experience.
  3. Review the work of technical entities, e.g. IPv6 Forum, UCIF, CEA IPv6 Working Group, UPnP, etc. to evaluate progress on adopting IPv6 within the industry, and where necessary develop formal liaisons with them to help coordinate efforts and avoid duplication of efforts.
  4. Function as a resource for SIP Forum members for technical information and advice on matters related to SIP over IPv6 and SIP in Dual IP networks, as well as infrastructure issues, such as stateful/stateless address auto configuration, security and others.
  5. Identify areas where existing standards for SIP over IPv6 and dual stack are inadequate or non-existent. This can be in technical documents, network architectures, standards, etc.
  6. Provide direction and technical leadership in resolving problems related to SIP when using IPv6, or co-existence technologies.
  7. Develop recommendations to standards organizations based on research, discoveries and suggested courses of action to remedy deficiencies uncovered by the SIP over IPv6 task group.

The work will take place using the public SIP Forum IPv6 mailing list (open to anyone to join) as well as periodic conference calls.

On a personal level, I’m delighted to see this IPv6 Task Group emerge. At SIPNOC 2012, I gave a presentation on SIP and IPv6 (slides available) and facilitated the BOF session where we discussed creating this task group within the SIP Forum. I was thrilled that John Berg of Cable Labs and Andy Hutton of Siemens Enterprise Communications stepped forward to lead the effort and it’s outstanding to see it launch.  I’m looking forward to participating in the discussions and to seeing these tasks accomplished.

If you want to help move real-time communications into the IPv6 world, please join the mailing list and help the SIP Forum move this work forward!

Skype Releases Photo-Sharing for iPhone/iPad – Trying to Disrupt MMS? iMessage?

Today Skype launched an attack on sending photos via Apple's iMessage, via email or via traditional SMS/MMS with the release of photo sharing for the iPhone and iPad versions of Skype. The key point of the blog post to me is this:

There's no limit on the size of the file you can send, so you can send photos without reaching email size limits or paying expensive MMS charges.

This is yet another example of Skype seeking to disrupt the traditional telecom industry as an "over-the-top (OTT)" app - and make the user experience that much easier. (And yes, I am fully aware that Skype for Android has had file sharing since December 2011.)

Skype's blog post doesn't directly mention Apple's iMessage, but that's the reality of what else will be disrupted. Think about it... here is what you have for options inside the built-in "Photos" capability of an iPhone:

Iphone photos

You can either email the photo or use the "Message" which goes either through the traditional SMS/MMS route - or via iMessage. This Skype functionality replaces both of those capabilities... although you need to be in the Skype application to use the sharing. Note that for a reason I'll explain later, Skype's photo sharing does NOT replace what you can share with Twitter.

Using Photo Sharing on an iPhone

I'll admit that I didn't find the sharing of the photo immediately intuitive on the iPhone, largely because Skype overloaded the "phone" icon in the upper right corner to do more than just initiate a call. In the new version, after you enter a chat with someone and tap the phone icon, you get a menu where you can share the photo:

Iphone send photo 1

After choosing to send a photo, you then can choose to take a new photo or share an existing photo:

Iphone send photo 2

The recipient then needs to accept the photo transfer, after which you see an indicator bar showing the progress - and then the fact that the photo was transferred:

Iphone send photo 3 1 Iphone send photo 4 2

From a recipient point of view, receiving the photo is simply a matter of watching the blue progress bar and then seeing the photo displayed:

Iphone send photo 5 Iphone send photo 6

I'll note that it displays nicely in a landscape view as well, although the photo is actually displayed larger in the portrait view:

Iphone send photo 7

All in all a fairly straightforward experience and I thank my friend Dean Elwood for helping me test this out. The re-use of the "phone" icon is a bit strange - and non-intuitive - but once you get used to that it's okay.

Using Photo Sharing on an iPad

Photo sharing on the iPad was very similar, with the added benefit that the icon in the upper right was the much more intuitive "+" symbol. Again, when in a chat with someone you just touch the "+" and choose "Send Photo":

Ipad send photo 1

You again have the choice to take a photo or use an existing photo:

Ipad send photo 2

After which the photo nicely appears within the Skype client:

Ipad send photo 3

Again, a rather straightforward and easy user experience.

The Desktop Disconnect

While this works great for sending photos between iOS devices (and I will assume to Android devices), the user of the traditional Skype desktop app does not have such a seamless experience. Here is what happened when I accepted a photo from Dean in the latest Skype for Mac version:

Send photo desktop

I then had to double-click the icon to open the image in the separate "Preview" application on my Mac. It would be great if in some future version of the desktop version of Skype the images would be displayed inline as they are on the mobile versions.

The Android Difference

It's also interesting to note that Skype for Android lets you share any kind of files, beyond just photos. As noted in the Skype for Android FAQ:

You can send and receive any type of file over Skype for Android and can view any file you receive as long as you have the necessary software or application installed. There are no limits on the size of the file you can send. As long as the person you’re sending the file to has enough memory on their phone, they can store the file.

Several mobile developer friends have indicated that this is due to the difference in the mobile operating systems and the fact that Android gives developers access to more file capabilities than does iOS. Still, it's just an interesting difference between the platforms.

Not Displacing Facebook / Instagram / Google+ / Twitter / etc.

My initial thought on seeing Skype's blog post was that Skype was going to try to take on photo sharing services like Facebook, Instagram, Google+ or even Twitter. It became rapidly clear that this photo sharing service is NOT attempting to do that (yet, anyway). A couple of reasons:

1. It only works with 1-to-1 chats. You can only get that "Send Photo" button when you are in a direct, 1-to-1 chat with another Skype user. When you are in a group chat, there is no way to share a photo. If there was, you could start using groups as a way to share photos... but that capability isn't there.

2. There is no web access for photos. When you share a photo there is no URL you could give someone else to see the photo. The photo does not appear to be stored on any server anywhere. Rather it is simply transferred from one local Skype client to another local Skype client.

3. Both Skype clients must be online. The sender and recipient both have to be online for the photo to be transferred. This is true of all Skype file transfers and photos are no different.

For the moment this seems all about sharing a photo with someone else with whom you are conversing.

So Who Will Use This Photo Sharing in Skype?

But will people actually use this new feature? After all, Skype's blog post today refers to this as "a frequently requested feature." (Although without any details about by whom it was requested.)

I'm going to guess that Skype's proverbial use case is that you were out during the day, took some photos, and then some time later are in a voice or video call with someone and want to share the photos of what you did earlier. It's the old "Look, Grandma, here are some great photos of us at the amusement park!"

Or maybe you came back from a trip and want to share some photos with someone you call... or maybe you are in the midst of a trip and want to call home and share the photos. ("Hey, Dan, just calling you from our hotel in Rome. Look at all the cool cathedrals we saw over the last few days!")

I could see that usage... subject to my caveat below.

The Battery Problem

Skype's blog post shows the case of a young woman sending a photo to a friend of some new shoes she found. As compelling as this might be...

... I would never use Skype this way!

Or at least... I haven't yet.

Why not?

Skype for iOS drains the battery rather quickly!

For that reason I never leave Skype running on either my iPad or iPhone. I do use Skype while traveling, but it's a case of firing up Skype, making the call and then killing off Skype on the iOS device so that the batteries will last longer.

Instead for sharing photos I would simply send off the photo via Apple's iMessage... or email the photo to someone.

Now, in Skype's post today, they indicate that this new release for iOS includes performance improvements that will help with battery life:

We've also improved the overall performance of Skype's mobile apps. We've made them less battery hungry when running in the background, so you'll now be able to answer Skype calls throughout the day when they come in. And, as you'll be able to keep Skype open, you can respond to or send IMs to friends and colleagues all day long.

That, to me, will be the key for the usage and adoption of this photo sharing. I need to be comfortable leaving Skype running on my iOS devices - and so do my recipients. If we all get to the point where Skype is just "always on" on our iOS (and Android) devices... then yes, we might start using this as a way to share photos.

Undoubtedly that is how Skype / Microsoft would like the scenario to play out... we'll have to see how indeed that does work out.

What do you think? Will you use this photo sharing within Skype for the iPhone or iPad? Or will you use one of the other ways to share photos within iOS?


UPDATE, 22 Aug 2012 - Jim Courtney published a piece with his views: Skype Photo Sharing: A Conversation Feature – Not an App


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