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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.
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.
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.
Why are today's kids so fond of the ephemeral?
The conversations I used to have down the pub back before mobile phones were generally a thing were ephemeral. The nice thing is that of course you could (and did!) talk utter shite and it generally wouldn't come back to haunt you. Likewise, I could drivel on the phone (rotary dial, too) for bloody hours with much the same effect.
I'm guessing that the yoof of today wants to interact in much the same way, except the world has moved on and communication is via the 'tubes these days. They seem to have quite sensibly realised that having all the crap be ephemeral by default (like it used to be) is much better than having the crap you wrote when you were 15 and angsty come back because Zuckerberg decided to tweak the privacy settings again.
You know, back in the day, I had a geocities page. Black background. And it scrolled metallica lyrics along the status bar at the bottom using some javascript snippet. Fuck me I'm glad that's vanished into the void and that I didn't use my real name on it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.