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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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?