Sharing Tools News

30 percent of Skype’s users are businesses, and the Business Control Panel is a handy way for them to manage Skype credit and SkypeIn numbers. The trusty panel now knows some new tricks:

— Easily invite co-workers (using a company email list)
— Create a members directory so employees know who else belongs to the same company
— View itemized call reports for your members
— Purchase up to €1,000 of Skype credit at once
— Automatically top-up your Control Panel credit balance

Read Scott Davison’s fresh post on the Skype Business blog for details on these new features.

Continue reading "TLC for business users" »

Those of you who worry that your public chat will break under the weight of participants, worry no more. (Or worry less, for a more gradual approach.) It used to be that public chats had a 100-person limit. Chat walls have now been rubberized and can now accommodate 150.

Continue reading "Public chats can now handle 150 participants (and you thought 100 was cool)" »

Part of operating a company is reviewing your activities. And things and projects have a natural lifecycle — they are born, they live, and then they sometimes come to an end.

Some time in 2005, we set up a system on share.skype.com where you could put a Skype banner on your site. When your visitors clicked on the banner, they were redirected to Skype and you could earn what we called Skype Points. Until now, there was nothing you could do with these points, and we didn’t put too much effort into developing this program. Over time, it became obsolete.

We thus decided to discontinue this program. We thank everyone who invested their time and effort in promoting Skype with these banners. Thanks Everyone who managed to collect at least one properly recorded Skype point from 2005 until the end of March 2007 is going to get an award in the form if Skype Voicemail and in case of higher point count, also Skype Credit voucher. Feel free to use it yourself or give it to someone else. Details are in a Skype chat message that you should have received from me by now. Feel free to ask me directly if you have any questions about this.

The share.skype.com banners have stopped working by now, so I recommend you remove them from your site to prevent your visitors from seeing page errors.

This does not mean that we are downscaling our affiliate activities. To the contrary, this lets us focus these activities in channels that make more sense to both Skype and our wider community. We continue to invest in and develop our affiliate programs. If you would like to continue to promote Skype and earn money while doing it, please take a look at http://www.skype.com/partners/affiliate/ where you will find more information about how to join our current active affiliate program.

This is just a small housekeeping note that on our English blogs here, you no longer see trackbacks. Well, you might be seeing some with some older posts, but we won’t accept any new ones. Instead, we’ll use what Technorati has and we’ll gather “blog reactions” from there.

So with all our posts in index and one post views, you’ll now see a “blog reactions” link that, when you click on it, does a Technorati search and shows you all other blogs that have written about the given post. So if you want to get some traffic when writing about us, just make sure that your blog is properly indexed by Technorati and we’ll pick it up from there.

We’ll be thinking what to do about the non-English blogs. Technorati is currently available in English and Japanese only and the link count tool doesn’t seem to be very easily localizable for us, so we’ll see about that.

The reason for this change was that we got sick of trackback spam, and many blogs don’t implement the trackback protocol but are still indexed fine in Technorati.

Public chats are great - provided you can find one on a topic that interests you. Unfortunately we don’t have an official directory of Public Chats (yet), so here’s an unofficial one. If you’re hosting a Public chat or know good ones, please help other Skype users find out.

We want to give Skype hardware for hosts of most active public chats. We can’t participate in all public chats, so we have to limit this to hosts who have added the contact publicchatfan to their chat before the 12th of March. It’s not a contest for the most chat messages. Think of it as a small Thank you to users who have helped to make Skype more useful, fun or both. I’be announcing six lucky winners here on the 19th of March. One of them receives a Philips VOIP 321 phone and five will receive a Logitech webcam.

And here’s a tip from Voidstar if you want to find out about more public chats, but can’t find them in the directory - search for joinpublicchat which is an integral part of any public chat code and you’ll see them beautifully displayed in your favourite search engine. Just some link “engineering” needed later

See the unofficial directory of public chats

Are you part of Skype’s larger “ecosystem”? Are you a developer working with Skype API, or just planning to become one? We’re calling all developers to help us by filling our survey to help us improve our offering to you. This includes technical as well as business roles. So take a look at the linked post from Antoine and fill out the survey to help us help you.

Maybe you one day tried to get in the Skype English blog chat, but couldn’t, as it was full. We are now filtering the chat and ejecting people who are not active there to try to get more activity in this chat. If you want to participate, just click the big blue link in the top right corner of every page here on the blog, and have your say on whatever Skype-related is on your mind.

To look at the posting activity, I made myself this little Skype API client with about 120 lines of Visual Basic code and a few hours of time. Probably won’t ever be released as a proper program, but you may ask me for it if you want to look at your own chat activity, or post ideas about what more you want to analyse in chats.

Try making your own Skype API clients if you’re into programming — Microsoft Visual Studio Express, containing Visual Basic, is available free of charge, and Skype4COM is easy to get started with.

The separate Skypecasts blog that we used to have is no more. We’ve migrated all the articles over to this one and will now be posting any Skypecasts-related updates straight here on the Share.Skype blog.

Shashi Tharoor has worked for the United Nations since 1978 and has been involved in peace keeping operations across the world. Shashi Tharoor is currently running as a candidate for the United Nations Secretary General. He’s holding a Skypecast right now.

Read more details or join the Skypecast.

Today, we made configuration changes to how the feeds are generated out of all the Skype blogs (see the list in the right sidebar). You may see the recent items appearing twice in your feed reader program or service. I am sorry for the confusion — it is a one-time change only and was needed to make our feeds work better. There are some improvements now as well — some feeds did not show the author name previously, but do now.

Also, if you are reading the feeds directly using the RSS or ATOM feeds provided off this site (feed name index.xml or atom.xml), I encourage you to switch over to FeedBurner feed. You will find the FeedBurner feed links in the right sidebar of the respective blog. These feeds give you more features such as author names and always fulltext feeds, also look fine in a regular browser, as well as enable us to fine-tune the feed experience and accurate statistics.

We continue to get questions in the eBay Skype discussion board and other channels about what to do if your web host doesn’t allow JavaScript. Many hosts don’t, and that’s good for security. However, the Skype button wizard offers you code with JavaScript by default, which may not work or may produce some weird results as it gets sanitized or filtered by the web host.

There’s a simple way out. In the Skype button generator wizard, you can choose between “web HTML” and “email HTML”. The main difference between the two is that the first one is with JavaScript and the second one is without it. We figured that calling them “with JavaScript” and “without JavaScript” was a bit too geeky and so we went with web/email HTML, since most web-based and standalone e-mail clients don’t allow JavaScript anyway, so it made sense.

To switch from web HTML to email HTML, just select the appropriate option before copying the code.

Why have JavaScript there in the first place? The Skype buttons themselves work fine without it — if everyone coming to your site has Skype installed. If you don’t have Skype and click on a skype: link, one of two things happen.

• if your code doesn’t have the JavaScript thing, they may see some ugly and strange browser or e-mail client error.
• if your code has the JavaScript thing, a friendly error pops up, telling a bit about Skype and suggesting the visitor to download and install it. See an example.

We now have a UK country blog where you’ll see news and comments about any- and everything happening around the UK and Skype. So subscribe if you’re from the UK and want to learn about what’s happening here, or even if you’re not from the UK but just generally interested in what the Brits are up to in Skypeland.

This main English blog that you’re reading now will try to maintain a global perspective, with more English and non-English country/region blogs rolled out as we go along. You’ll always see the full blogs and microsites list in the right sidebar.

Due to boringly excessive amount of trackback spam, we’ve turned on trackback moderation on all the blogs and microsites hosted here (you see the list in the sidebar on the right). So if you post a trackback and don’t see it immediately, it means it’s held in moderation queue and we’ll publish it as soon as we see it.

Sorry about that — but we want to keep this site spam-free. If you got great tips or tricks about how to keep immediately publishing while keeping spam where it should be — in junk — then please drop me a line privately.

We now have a new site, the Skype Heartbeat. The objective of Heartbeat is to be a no-nonsense location where you can see the status of the Skype infrastructure components that support all the free and paid features. There are two main parts to the site:

• Current status of all our primary and secondary systems, indicated with icon as well as text. If you see it bright red and pulsing, it’s fine (the smaller icons don’t pulse, they’re just bright red). If it’s darker and broken, there’s no circulation and it’s dead.
• Text announcements about infrastructure availability and other important changes, such as pricelist or regional updates.

I like the concept of “heartbeat” that we came up with for this. Sometimes you see these things called “system status” or something equally boring. But they’re not boring — behind the scenes, there are countless machines and people working day and night to keep Skype running, even though Skype is about direct connections between users for the most part. So if Skype is an ecosystem and organism, it must also have a central circulatory system to keep all the components in good health. And Heartbeat shows you what’s the current health of this all.

So whenever you’re having trouble with Skype, be sure to check Heartbeat. The other channels to get more information continue to be our Customer Service and forums.

We have a new site — About Skype. You can also access it as press.skype.com It’s effectively the “Company” section of our site revamped, the publishing mechanisms brushed up quite a bit and tons of new info added, such as the updated Executive Team, new product overview and lots more. It’s the site where you want to go when you’re a journalist or someone else and looking for quick, concise and to-the-point info about Skype, including the latest news releases. Formerly we were not so good at quickly publishing our releases at our own site, and there was no simple mechanism such as an RSS feed to keep up with them. There is now, so you can head over to the site or subscribe to the feed right away. You may still see links to the old “About” and news sections on some parts of our site, but we’ll be redirecting these to the new site shortly.

One thing we have chosen to do is to not enable comments on the “About” site on news releases. This is because we want to keep it clean and concise. If you want to talk back to us, there are lots of other channels you can use, such as the forums, our customer service or this Share Skype blog. We do have trackbacks enabled, however, so if you are re-publishing and commenting the news on your site, feel free to track back to us and those links will also show up on the site.

Oops. Comments on these blogs were broken for about a day. Fixed now. Sorry about that. You can now again fire away :-)

If you tried to trackback to the blogs here on share.skype.com, you may have gotten a “403 Throttled” error, even though everything was OK on your side. Whoops. Sorry about that. Turns out there was some stuff missing from our configuration. All fixed now, so if it failed previously, feel free to re-post your ping.

If you’re getting this on your own Movable Type blog, check out this thread for a very helpful explanation of the issue. Thanks, totalchoicehosting. And dear Six Apart, please document this stuff better going forward :) ideally make these settings available in online blog/system configuration.

For quite some time now, you may have experienced problems with your SkypeWeb status updating. It was either too slow or not working at all.

A couple of days ago, after consulting with NASA and other rocket scientists, we found that there was a bug in the code. After finding, we squashed it very badly and it said it’s sorry it ever crawled in.

The bug is now gone and SkypeWeb status updates are again good and instant.

Do you like Skype 2.5? If you do, please use these My Pictures to spread the word. Just set one of these as My Picture in Skype and enjoy the oohs and aahs.

Our friends at Skype Journal, the independent Skype news, views and support site, are experimenting with Skype Tags and icons. You could say it’s a combination of Skype Web and Skype links. This is exactly the kind of thing we made them for. It’s good to see them on Skype Journal, and we hope they will eventually make their way to many more of the world’s blogs and sites with help from us, Skype Journal and others.

A while ago, we put out the call for user stories. The call still stands, and you can keep sending us your stories.

What’s changed now, though, is that we’re happy to give you back some of the stories. See the brand new Skype stories site.

See the high flight movie with Lori and Keith. Or see how Giulio talks for hours with his grandson Gavin. Or how Alison took Skype into movie business. And all the others, of course. And keep checking back, we’ll be adding new stories regularly.

Getting the stories out there is important for us, since it shows what Skype is all about. Above all, it’s about people who talk to each other. Everything else that comes after that, is secondary. We intend to keep it this way, and we bring you the stories to remind you of that little humble thought.

Here’s a funny little video about how posting in forums, for example Skype forums, should work and how you should think of it.

Don’t watch this if you don’t have a sense of humour or want only “politically correct” stuff. It has dirty words and violence, but it’s for a greater good of the whole humanity ;) While it is mainly aimed at forum users, it applies also to commenting on blogs such as here on Skype blogs.

This was originally made for Steam forums. Steam is a system where you don’t need to go to store to buy boxed games, you can just download them to your computer for free or for a fee, depending on the publisher, and then play with other people online. So all the power to Steam and thanks to the author of this video, whoever and wherever you are — I couldn’t find proper credits so I hope it’s fine to repost and host it this way.

Here’s a picture for your Skype client to celebrate. Set it as your picture and let others know. Also note that Skype 2.0 now supports the PNG image format. Previously, only BMP and JPG were supported, and they continue to be.

What are blogs?

Blogs are a way to share facts, ideas and opinions directly between people. This blog is run by the makers of Skype and our friends, helpers and partners.

We set up the Skype blogs to present our view of the world, business and technology. Not least, making Skype is an incredible journey and the blogs are a humble attempt to document and capture it. We find making Skype both demanding and fun — it used to be so in the beginning and continues to be.

We see skype.com and the blogs to be complementary to each other. On skype.com, you can find our product and service information, as well as the official company profile, jobs info and press releases. In the blog, we hope to capture a bit more dynamics of what goes around them all. It is important for us to know what the world thinks of Skype and we hope to contribute back to the discussion with the blogs.

There are many different category areas here, which you can browse by using the links in the “Categories” section in the righthand menu.

For in-depth info about what are blogs and blogging, see the Wikipedia entry.

Continue reading "What are blogs and RSS?" »

Now you can share your love of Skype even if you’re away from your computer! Introducing the Skype screensaver. Just install it and you’re all set — when you walk away from your computer, people will see the Skype World.

Download screensaver for Windows, Mac OS X or Mac OS Classic.

We recently announced Skype Buttons, and support for them is now starting to show up in various systems. This just came in — Skype Buttons plugin for Wordpress, a popular blogging system.

As one of Skype’s resident Mac heads, it is my duty to share the little tips and tricks that we uncover in our own quest to have the ultimate Skype on Mac experience. With the launch of our new Skype Me buttons and the coming launch of SkypeWeb (you can show your Skype online status in near real-time on your blog or email) I wanted to share a few tricks to adding Skype Me buttons to your email signature in Mac OS X 10.4’s Mail application. I love Mail.app because it is simple, has an elegant UI, and most importantly supports Apple’s Spotlight technology which gives you instant search results across your email almost instantly. Its like having Google in your inbox.

It turns out that Mail.app’s signature editor isn’t all that HTML friendly and just pasting in HTML to the signature editor will not achieve the desired effect, in fact it will just plain not work. Here is a quick crash course to get you up an running with a Skype Me button in your signature in Apple Mail so your friends can Skype you back instead of replying in email. The following steps require a little tech savvy, but if you follow the steps below you will be up an running in minutes with a Skype Me button in your sig file.

Continue reading "Mac How-to: Adding a Skype Me Button to your signature file in Apple Mail" »

As part of the Skype for Windows 1.4 release, we bring you the enhanced, advanced, fully reworked and revamped Skype buttons for your blog, website or e-mail signatures. Now, we had some sort of buttons before, but they weren’t very interesting. The new ones are much more fun and useful.

We went to great lengths to make the buttons useful. Getting them right in all the browsers and mail clients wasn’t easy at all and there may be glitches remaining, but most bugs should be ironed out by now. We think the dropdown multi-action one is the coolest — not only does it let you call, but you can also add the person to your Contacts, start a chat, leave voicemail, view profile or start sending a file. But the individual action buttons are fun too, and can be used in e-mails where the dropdown one wouldn’t work.

Developers who want to keep up with the latest happenings, plans, releases, and news from Skype and the Skype Developer Zone have a new resource. With the launch of the Skype Developer Blog, we want to raise the frequency and transparency in our communications with developers and bring the conversation to the forefront. It is simple, straight forward and to the point, but will continue to grow and evolve over the coming weeks. It’s a start in the right direction and an invitation to join the conversation. Oh … and yes a dedicated RSS feed is coming ;)

We’ve made some improvements on share.skype.com over the past days. Many of them because you asked for it. Anything else you need? :)

• capacity upgrade. At times during the past few weeks, the site was unresponsive or even down at times. No more, as we’ve boosted capacity the system can handle. So bring all your friends here.
• trackback support. The trackback URL is at the end of each article, close to where you can post comments.
• comments and profiles now support line breaks (just hit Enter - no HTML). Things that look like web links (http, https, or host names beginning with www) are made clickable automatically. You can use the [quote][/quote] pseudo-tags to do quoting.
• text affiliate links. Want to collect Skype points but don’t want those banners and instead, want to embed the link in your text? Just head to the affiliate banners page and scroll down to copy-paste the text link code. (You can of course modify the text that is displayed, as we couldn’t stop you from doing that anyway.)
• latest forum posts. To the right, you can see the latest forum posts that take you directly to the forum, so that you can easily keep an eye on what people talk about.
• Skype extras showcase here had some weird sorting bugs and wouldn’t show you more than 5 items regardless of what you picked in the dropdown. Fixed.
• Skype API 1.3 documentation, available here, had initially some weird bugs that made some subtitles invisible. All fixed. We know there’s an issue with rendering it on Firefox, as it loses the content of some example “boxes”. If this happens to you, just hit Refresh, or try another browser. (And that document in itself at this time is not very usable, we know — we’re working on getting you the PDF, and making the web version friendlier.)

Due to popular demand, the Skype Banners are now available in the following languages: English (as before), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish. Go get them and start collecting Skype Points!

Even though we kicked off share.skype.com just a couple of days ago without that much visibility from any of our other sites or services yet, feedback has been great! Thanks to all who have been giving feedback, ideas and bug reports. Here’s the list of what we have updated over the last few days.

Continue reading "Fixes, fixes... plus affiliate program kickoff, SkypeIn number renewal" »