Skype hit 100 million registered Skype Names a few hours ago. 1:12 PM GMT to be precise. That's pretty remarkable -- as far as we know, no Internet programs have hit that mark in two and a half years since their birth before. Skype continues to be the fastest-growing Internet program.

Here's a My Picture you can use in Skype to celebrate.

We took a look at Skype Names. Here's how the whole 100M names are distributed across name lengths. No surprise here, a pretty average long-tail normal distribution curve. 10-character Skype Names are the most popular.

(What's with the less-than-6-character Skype Names? No, you can't get one through the regular methods. Yes, there are a few out there. We can manually add them. We've been thinking it would be fun to run "short Skype Name" auctions on eBay so you could buy a name like "john", "jill" and then hold on to it forever. Would you buy one?)

More stats. The total number of characters in all Skype Names combined is 1,034,643,723. That's roughly equal to 1 GB of data. Meaning that if you wanted to just write all the Skype Names in a file, you would need 1 GB of disk space.

Let's put this another way. Suppose we wanted to print a phonebook with all Skype Names in it, to help our callers. According to [this source](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001Ib&topic_id=1), a phonebook page has about 18,000 characters. So the Skype phone book would have to be more than 57,000 pages thick. Fortunately, we don't need to print that -- we have put it right in Skype itself. Just click the "Search" button in Skype and find whoever you want without going through all those pages.

And here's a lousy screen capture of the moment when 100 million actually happened on skype.com earlier today