I’m a big fan of the Skype internet phone service, as I’ve written about many times previously (here and here, for instance). I use it a great deal, both for business and personal use. The free service is obviously good from a cost point of view.
But it’s the paid service (SkypeOut) that is most impressive in that regard – I’ve seen my normal phone bill drop by over 60% per month since I started using SkypeOut three months ago for all phone calls I make to normal phones outside The Netherlands.
The regular phone companies should be exceedingly nervous about services like Skype.
One person who’s consistently skeptical about Skype, though, and whose blog posts about it I tend to pay attention to, is Om Malik.
So I was pretty interested to read Om’s post yesterday on why he’s currently re-thinking his views about Skype. From that post:
[…] What really rocks my world is the third party apps for Skype. Qzoxy which is one of the “presence’ apps that leverages Skype as a communication channel. However, it is Jyve which has impressed me the most.
A Jyve Tag is a snippet of HTML code that you can copy-paste into any web page. This snippet of code produces a live Skype Button which shows your current Skype status. This enables you to show your presence on any web page. If this button is clicked, it launches your Q-Card. Q-Card is a Internet Call centre. It allows you to collect call back info from people visiting your site.
I think you should try it out, and very soon I am going to be implementing it on my site as well. I think if we see more of these applications, then I think Skype would become really more useful than just a replacement for the telephone as we have known it.
More in Om’s full post.