Skype is starting to flesh out their developer network. They hired a guy from Microsoft. Now they have a blog. I doubt it’s a coincidence that the third posting is about the rules for using the Skype marks. In my experiance developer net managers spend way too much time worrying that bone. Maybe soon they will have an RSS feed for it.
They have a really facinating set of options for creating a platform. A significant foot print on the client side and some cool of technologies (encrypted pairwise peer to peer streaming). It makes for a facinating set of possiblities.
For example there is no reason why their technology couldn’t be used to stream data rather than voice. You can imagine factories where every machine is on Skype. Interested parties then subscribe to the machine’s rich presence information and from time to time call it and dialog about it’s realtime status.
It is certainly interesting, but you can already do what you propose with IRC or Jabber.
Except those two protocols and their clients don’t do encrypted pairwise peer-to-peer streaming.
OK, I’ll shut up now. 🙂