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Skype Announces Big Makeover Focused on Messaging and Social Sharing, But Will That Drive Its Popularity? (technarratives.com)
Skype on Thursday became the latest app in the growing list of services that are copying features straight from Snapchat. Microsoft-owned service announced a major redesign of its mobile app, which now comes with a feature called "Highlights" that lets users share photos and videos that will only be temporarily visible to their friends. The feature, as you can imagine, carries a strong resemblance to Snapchat's "Stories," a format that has been growing in popularity among young audiences. All of Facebook's consumer-focused services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, also offer a similar feature in their apps. What will be interesting to see in the coming weeks is whether the redesign and the new feature will give Skype a boost among users. Analysts are skeptical. Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research offers a reality-check: Skype is one of those odd products -- a fairly sizable communications property owned by a major tech company, and yet one which doesn't make much money, isn't growing much, and hasn't really been focused on either messaging or social communication. [...] The new design puts social sharing and messaging much more prominently in the app, but that's no guarantee that people will actually use those features more or even see Skype as a natural place to do that kind of sharing.
It's dead, Jim.
Those who cannot get out of the inundation zone under their own power will quickly be overtaken by a greater one. A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.
Social media as a business model has very low barriers to entry. As such, your ideas are treated as a drive-through diner for anyone bothering to compete with you.
Free Admission on the Anniversary of Justice Louis Brandeis' Confirmation at National Museum of American Jewish History
What is this "Sky Pee" you speak of?
crazy dynamite monkey
Instead of adding crap that no one wants how about fixing the stuff that people actually DO want? Like respecting the user's choice to turn off forced updates.
https://community.skype.com/t5...
Skype is a useful tool for business, if they fuck it up with a bunch of social media integration I won't trust it anymore. We probably put too much trust in it now, but if it gets a social media upgrade it's going strait in the garbage for me.
It would help if the clients weren't all different code bases and getting worse every release.
I really like how Close Combat in AoS has that strategy of picking your melee combatants in an “I Go, You Go” fashion. However, one thing that never sat quite right was the idea that if I charged in with a ton of little units into a BIG unit, and the big unit swung first, all my little units would go *poof* – especially when I charged them! Why would I ever engage a unit with more than a unit or two? Maybe that was the point – but I don’t like it.
Ever since random faces started appearing on my communications tool, I've used it less and less. Been months, now. If it made decent calls I'd probably go back. It doesn't. I won't.
Among people I know, Skype is the dominant product for two purposes: (i) long-distance professional meetings, such as e.g. talking to a foreign research collaborator or performing job interviews abroad; (ii) long-distance calls to your mum or your wife when you're out travelling. The features they're introducing won't be that interesting for these groups that are already using Skype, while the young segment they're trying to capture already use Snapchat for this purpose.
Social media is already having serious issue on multiple fronts. Everything to advertiser problems, to rampant censorship issues, on out to a hemorrhaging user base across most platforms. The idea that social media would ever make Skype better is just a sad delusion at best and a sign of real serious ideological issues at Microsoft as a whole.
Wasn't there a big fat Skype logo on a certain now-infamous powerpoint slide? That's a pretty good reason not to use it for anything remotely important. or anything really.
I remember what put skype on the map, before they got acquired and wrecked by Microsoft. It was secure, audio quality was surprisingly good even with very limited bandwidth, and it was easy to find people to talk to, and connect to legacy phone networks with SkypeOut.
It won't be me, but whoever puts out a new app that meets that description can do pretty well.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
As long as the UI is designed by a monkey, looks and works completely different on Windows versus Mac verus iOS (I did not dare to try the Android version yet), it will never fly.
Just clicked on a link on iOS skype a few minutes ago. Instead of opening in Safari it opend in a mediocre working and awfull looking build in web browse ...
An then again there is Skype for business (Lynx?) on windows 10 ... I can only say, it is to bad that the old custom to have some dark, damp and cold dungeons bellow your building has gone away.
Those dungeons were quite usefull to explain simple concepts of "how not to make a GUI"!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I use skype for one thing - talking to clients or potential clients. Neither end of that conversation has ever wanted social media involved.
Time to use the burial plot right next to Zune for Skype.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What is this discord you speak of? Oh, that ugly nodejs garbage that wastes desktop space.
At least Skype doesn't tie everything to a cellular phone number, like Viber and the rest of that ilk. I actually like Skype pretty well.
The mobile Skype app uses so many goddamned resources just rendering the UI that it's a dog-shit slow piece of junk.
And I still receive messages even though I'm supposed to be signed out and the app cleared from RAM. Stupid.
Instead of listening to the people actually using it, they're just playing "Catch-Up With The Johnsons."
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Why are today's kids so fond of the ephemeral?
Privacy?
The freedom and safety of not having a permanent record?
A culture of taking online the normal unrecorded stream-of-consciousness interaction between friends?
Is this appropriate for companies who deliver news?
Is there a reduction in creating and publishing things worth preserving, or is it just a case of the separate normal ephemera of life being taken online?
Will we, or youth, always share so much online, or is it a fad because the tools are new?
There used to be an app on Android called TextSecure, and another app called RedPhone. It was nice because both offered end to end encryption for messages and calls. The app even stored incoming/outgoing texts with encryption, so if the phone was unlocked, the messages were still protected.
Changing the icons for Skype vs. Skype for Business? Every place I've worked, these icons cause MASS CONFUSION with endusers. None of them realize that these are two separate products. The idea of just having an swapped color scheme is retarded. This is pure "marketing department driving IT" here, there was no technical reason to rename Lync. It's only a half-assed change, it's still referenced as Lync in the required DNS settings, in various registry settings, etc. Perhaps finishing up the change-over FIRST before deploying a bunch of new features...oh wait, this is Microsoft we're talking about.
Yes! If only someone still produced those apps. Maybe even combined them into a single app!
'Microsoft-owned service announced a major redesign of its mobile app, which now comes with a feature called "Highlights" that lets users share photos and videos that will only be temporarily visible to their friends.' .. and there after permanently stored on the NSA Data Farm in Utah ..
Skype worked better before MS bought and 'improved' it.
People still want to use it for work. Argh!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Skype is useful for:
1) Multi-way business meetings with video
2) Calling phone numbers in other countries without messing with phone cards, etc.
3) screen sharing.
If you want to make Skype more useful, add desktop sharing/control.
The people I have on my Skype list are NOT people I want to social network with. The birthdays from old business contacts are annoying enough ...
Skype is a MEGA CORP CONTROLLED, BACKDOORED SPYING and CENTRALIZED piece of MALWARE SHIT.
I like and agree with the way you put it.
You fucking cunts at Microsoft just can't help screwing shit up, can you?
I don't want some craptastic "social-messaging and sharing" platform, I just want to make some fucking video calls to a few people.
You shitbags from Microsoft should all die in a fire.
I swear, if I had an orbital weapons platform, Redmond would be burnt off the face of the Earth with a concentrated energy beam and the churning pit of molten magma that I'd turn their campus into wouldn't cool down for 100 years.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
NO. If I wanted glitzy-ass social networking, I'd go for some. And here I recently got plenty riled up with these people enough for...
1) Tying Skype updates to Windows Store (comes with free complaints over decided inability to use far earlier versions... you know, without bloat, but that's a given) :| This reminds me too much of the days when I started noticing a worrying trend with MSN Messenger way back when, hit Trillian for my multi-platform needs and never thought too much of it, until I spied my brothers using it some years later. Graphic/animated emoticons had not only growing in number, but in size too.
2) Taking away themes (no option to white and blue Skype was a pain when by necessity working in a dark room in the middle of the night with a dark theme), followed by...
3) Giving me the option of trying a newfangled Skype on the PC (which actually did have a nice dark theme option included)... whilst making it impossible to turn off graphic emoticons, since I'm getting old and prefer my smiley faces to look like someone's fallen onto their side after drinking too much.
4) I forget, tacos for everyone.
5) Bloat. (Hey, I remembered.)
Sadly, I suppose I can only blame myself for jinxing it upon trying the new Skype on the PC, thinking that at least they couldn't possibly frak up Skype on Android. More. But then I keep forgetting that MS seems to be a late middle-aged man trying to wear baggy jeans like they just became fashionable and never understanding why people laugh and cry.
You can't handle the tin!
I quickly registered a skype account some days ago, to do standups with a remote developer.
Today microsoft says my account has sent spam.
No Microsoft, i won't give you my cell number. I will stop using Skype instead.