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?