In case you are unaware, Skype is an Internet telephony (VOIP) application that provides free voice communication, chat, and file transfer capabilities in an easy to use, cross-platform package.  For fee, Skype allows users to call regular phone numbers and allows regular phones to call into Skype.

The popularity of Skype has grown rapidly over the past two years since its introduction for a number of reasons.  Although I do not plan to go into many technical details here, I will say that Skype is a well engineered piece of networking magic.  It takes full advantage of modern decentralized peer-to-peer technology to deliver end-users a highly responsive system for communication.  The user interface is very simple to use and Skype is well known for simply working out of the box with very little configuration.

Skype released an API for the Windows platform at the end of 2004.  This alone sets it apart from a lot of the other big players like MSN and AOL.  As a developer, having an API available with this much power is an exciting thing.  If you are interested in taking a look, check out http://www.skype.com/community/devzone and look for the documentation and example code.

There are a number of third-party applications and utilities that have been developed for Skype.  You can check some of them out at http://www.skype.com/community/devzone/doc.html.  Skype also recently announced a contest for developers and they are calling for utilities, development tools, and other applications to help showcase their product.  After taking a look at their example C++ code I can see why they need some help with developer tools.  Here is a link to the competition.   http://www.skype.com/community/devzone/apicomp.html.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

4/30/2005 12:05:07 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)        Compelling News