December 2007

Having, admittedly, failed to think of anything goose-related today, I thought I'd point out that Skype is in active use on all six continents. While a search for people in Antarctica doesn't reveal a huge number of users, Jaanus blogged about Skype's use there a couple of years back and so I thought I'd share the photos again. You can see the full set over on Flickr.

As the end of 2007 approaches, take a few minutes to think about the five people you call most (or text, or whatever). I'd be surprised if your calling patterns didn't fall into a nice inverse square law relationship — the heart of Chris Anderson's Long Tail.

Take a look at your Skype call history now (you can arrange it by type to make things easier) — I'd be interested to hear if you see a difference with Skype when compared to, say, your mobile. That's certainly the case with me. On Skype, the distribution of calls and chats is much flatter than that for my mobile; while on both I obviously have more popular contacts, on Skype there's less of a bias towards a very small number of people.

Of course, this could be explained by the fact that I use Skype a lot at work, whereas my mobile's primarily for personal conversations — friends who are less close tend to receive emails rather than calls — but there's something about Skype (and other IM products, and MySpace, Facebook, etc.) which reduces the burden of communication in such a way to make talking to the people in what would otherwise be the long tail easier. Is it the fact that you can have largely asynchronous conversations? Or the fact that you can have conversations for free which would otherwise cost a lot? Thoughts?

It's always comforting to know that people feel at ease when making calls — a survey by the Post Office last year revealed that 40% of men make phone calls while naked, whereas only 27% of women do. The survey also suggests that most of us will happily watch TV while calling (62%) and one in ten of us will leave the other person talking to themselves while we go off and do something else.

It would have been interesting to see the breakdown of the other statistics by sex too, but I can't seem to track them down. I suppose the archetypal 'calling bird' is Prunella Scales' Sybil Fawlty, with her perennial chats with the mysterious Audrey, though in Sybil's case she's too engrossed in the phone calls to assist Basil with anything.

On a more serious note, it would be interesting to compare attention data from now with that from ten years ago — have Skype, email, IM and mobiles change the degree of respect with which we treat the people we're talking to? Or do they just allow us to do more? I can happily keep multiple Skype chats or other IM conversations going at once, for example, but would it be more efficient to call each person in turn? Quite often I find myself giving up on IM as it's too slow, and changing to voice.

In any case, for more on the calling birds, the BBC's h2g2 site has some suggestions…

Just a quick one today, with some handy hints about Christmas in France courtesy of the BBC:

• Send your presents early — in the north and northeast of France it's common for Father Christmas to bring presents on the 6th of December
• … or late — some adults will wait until New Year's Eve to open theirs
• The food's much the same — though seafood is commonly served as a starter, and they have a creamy Yule log rather than Christmas pudding

For all my efforts, though, I can't find any discernible difference between a French hen and a British one. Any thoughts?

Love is all around — or so says Bill Nighy’s character in Love Actually.

However, for those of you who’d always fancied a Skype girlfriend without the commitment, Mediamatic ran an interctive exhibition earlier this year called The Girlfriend Experience. Described as a ‘multi-player game with avatars of flesh and blood’, it allowed you to take control, using Skype, of a real life ‘avatar’.

A player tries to give instructions to one of the avatars of his choice. Photo: Guido van Nispen

The exhibition aimed to raise questions about how our virtual lives will affect our real ones:

The title of the project, The Girlfriend Experience, denotes the paradoxical character that online social interaction has. On one hand, the safe anonymity by using the avatar, on the other the intimate releases and projections that can spread easily. For Martin Butler is this the merging of two apparent extremes, anonymity and intimacy, which characterizes an important part of contemporary social traffic. The best paid prostitutes are the ones with whom the client feels as though he is with his girlfriend, or with whom he has a Girlfriend Experience.

You can see people playing with their Skype girlfriends in this video: (and more on YouTube)

Over the last year or so Skype’s done a lot to improve call quality, and it’s great when other people notice the difference too (and here too).

How does this relate to Christmas? Well, the first line of the traditional Christmas song, The Twelve Days of Christmas, certainly seems the least logical, but I suspect that it’s just a case of Chinese whispers.

‘Partridge’ in French is perdrix, pronounced ‘perdree’, and you can see that it wouldn’t take much to corrupt this to ‘pear tree’. There are other theories involving the ancient Greek king Perdrix, who with Athena had connections to the pear tree, but given that the ‘three calling birds’ who we’ll be visiting later almost certainly started out as ‘colley birds’ or blackbirds, so it’d be unsurprising if people had got the first line wrong too.

With the improvements made over the course of 2007 I hope your calls will have been crisper and clearer — but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped working. And while it’s great to see more and more people giving our call quality the thumbs-up, that doesn’t mean it can’t be even better. Please keep reporting any problems you encounter, and of course we won’t complain if you blog about things when they’re working well

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It’s always good to hear of people making good use of Skype, and I thought I’d bring you this presentation from Doug Kaye and Paul Figgiani from the Conversations Network.

They offer some advice on recording interviews using Skype, and invite you to join the discussion over at the Conversation Network forum.

Starting on Boxing Day, I’ll be posting a mini-series on the twelve days of Skype Christmas, bringing some wintry cheer to the blogosphere over the festive period.

There’ll be a special competition with Skype goodies to win, insights into the way we communicate, the sorts of conversations we have, as well as some predictions for 2008 and beyond.

The traditional song has an interesting history, which I’ll be investigating over the course of the series, but for a head start you might like to have a look at the BBC’s guide, which covers the basics, at least

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We’ve done a couple of posts about the need to change some SkypeIn numbers in London. As you may know, we’re going to give affected users a new SkypeIn number and voicemail free for 12 months. This is to thank you for your patience and to help make the switch as painless as possible.

To make the change as hassle-free as possible for you, we’d like to help you set up your new number before your current one stops working on December 20.

Your next step: activate your new number. (If you’d like to see if you can retain your current number outside of Skype, please contact GCI Telecom on sales@geonum.co.uk)

1. Visit www.skype.com/go/voucher
2. Log in and enter the voucher code that you received by email. If you didn’t get an email about changing the SkypeIn number, you’re probably fine and have nothing to worry about.

Unfortunately there is very limited availability of 020 7 numbers. This means you may not be able to get an 020 7 number to replace your existing one. However, we have plenty of 020 8 numbers and 020 3 numbers which OFCOM has introduced to cover the whole of Greater London.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact our customer advisors directly at sichange@skype.net. We’ve also created a step-by-step guide to help you redeem your voucher and choose your new SkypeIn number.