Skype Announces Big Makeover Focused on Messaging and Social Sharing, But Will That Drive Its Popularity? (technarratives.com) 62
Skype on Thursday became the latest app in the growing list of services that are copying features straight from Snapchat. Microsoft-owned service announced a major redesign of its mobile app, which now comes with a feature called "Highlights" that lets users share photos and videos that will only be temporarily visible to their friends. The feature, as you can imagine, carries a strong resemblance to Snapchat's "Stories," a format that has been growing in popularity among young audiences. All of Facebook's consumer-focused services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, also offer a similar feature in their apps. What will be interesting to see in the coming weeks is whether the redesign and the new feature will give Skype a boost among users. Analysts are skeptical. Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research offers a reality-check: Skype is one of those odd products -- a fairly sizable communications property owned by a major tech company, and yet one which doesn't make much money, isn't growing much, and hasn't really been focused on either messaging or social communication. [...] The new design puts social sharing and messaging much more prominently in the app, but that's no guarantee that people will actually use those features more or even see Skype as a natural place to do that kind of sharing.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
It's dead, Jim.
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It started to go downhill even before Microsoft took over.
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Skype or Skype for Business?
Skype for Business seems to be doing quite well as messaging/voice for the enterprise, especially if an organization is heavily invested in O365.
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It's doing well in the enterprise because it's bundled with Office which is the default suite of business applications: not because it's doing quite well as a communication tool on its own. My division deals with constant gripes from the end-users regarding UI/UX quirks related to Skype for Business.
Twenty year old products such as AOL Instant Messenger still beat out Skype and Skype for Business when it comes to user experience and commonsense UI design. I'm sure some Slashdot members would ask me to cit
I hope so! (Score:2)
People still want to use it for work. Argh!
Social media as a business model (Score:3)
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But also, since it has such a low barrier to entry, a company like Microsoft is at a bit of a disadvantage. There's no way they can be as nimble and experimental as a startup. Because of this, I think trying to chase the social networking market is a foolish move.
They'd be much smarter to use their status as a big, lumbering company that focuses on enterprise clients. Make solid, stable, reliable, efficient products that people can count on. Be forward thinking, but wait for new concepts and technologi
Discord (Score:2)
What is this "Sky Pee" you speak of?
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It's always like this.
They start quite good, then feature bloat comes, stupid decisions come, a flood of shit you can send come, and then it starts to eat too much memory and people move over to the next thing.
ICQ,AOL,MSN,Skype..
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It is like a phone service for the person at one end of the line, and like a Wince phone for the person at the other end. You may be able to make calls (sometimes, dependent on where the wind is blowing from), but you probably can't hear what the person at the other end is saying to you*, especially if the wind is actually blowing. Until it crashes.
* unless you are in the same room.
8.5 Billion wasted ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of adding crap that no one wants how about fixing the stuff that people actually DO want? Like respecting the user's choice to turn off forced updates.
https://community.skype.com/t5... [skype.com]
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And use of platform default behaviours, and basic configuration options for colors, and a truly compact mode for those of us
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Please don't ruin Skype (Score:4, Insightful)
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Skype is a useful tool for business, if they fuck it up with a bunch of social media integration I won't trust it anymore.
You shouldn't have trusted it since Microsoft bought and replaced it with a centralized clone of Skype. It's useful to business but you shouldn't be trusting it for anything including the privacy of your calls.
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There used to be an app on Android called TextSecure, and another app called RedPhone. It was nice because both offered end to end encryption for messages and calls. The app even stored incoming/outgoing texts with encryption, so if the phone was unlocked, the messages were still protected.
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Nobody needs Skype audio "quality" - or anything with (anti-) social features. Some of us need a version of the app that can make VoIP calls you can actually hear to people in other countries/time zones.
But the clients... (Score:1)
It would help if the clients weren't all different code bases and getting worse every release.
Wrong focus group (Score:5, Insightful)
Among people I know, Skype is the dominant product for two purposes: (i) long-distance professional meetings, such as e.g. talking to a foreign research collaborator or performing job interviews abroad; (ii) long-distance calls to your mum or your wife when you're out travelling. The features they're introducing won't be that interesting for these groups that are already using Skype, while the young segment they're trying to capture already use Snapchat for this purpose.
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Social media is just cancer and it won't help MS. (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3)
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I remember what put skype on the map, before they got acquired and wrecked by Microsoft. It was secure, audio quality was surprisingly good even with very limited bandwidth,
It should be. Ye Olde POTS was (at least in the UK) a giant plesichronus network running at a steady 64kbit/s as in 8KHz sampling, 8 bits per channel, u-law (or alaw??) encoded, but otherwise no compression. The call quality was decent if not spectacular, and I don't remember people yelling "what?" at each other as seems to make up the l
Simple awnser: no (Score:2)
As long as the UI is designed by a monkey, looks and works completely different on Windows versus Mac verus iOS (I did not dare to try the Android version yet), it will never fly.
Just clicked on a link on iOS skype a few minutes ago. Instead of opening in Safari it opend in a mediocre working and awfull looking build in web browse ...
An then again there is Skype for business (Lynx?) on windows 10 ... I can only say, it is to bad that the old custom to have some dark, damp and cold dungeons bellow your build
Please don't (Score:2)
They can't even get the paid version to work well (Score:2)
Time to use the burial plot right next to Zune for Skype.
Skype is pretty good actually (Score:3)
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Skype is crap, but I agree entirely: this current trend of tying accounts to phone numbers simply has to stop. It's BS.
Try slimming the fuck down. (Score:2)
The mobile Skype app uses so many goddamned resources just rendering the UI that it's a dog-shit slow piece of junk.
And I still receive messages even though I'm supposed to be signed out and the app cleared from RAM. Stupid.
Instead of listening to the people actually using it, they're just playing "Catch-Up With The Johnsons."
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Catch-Up With The Johnsons."
The Johnsons in this case being apparently Snapchat. Perhaps that's why you can only make calls for 10 seconds before it disconnects.
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Ten? Fuck you're lucky. I get about five at best even on a solid fiber connection.
Why Disappearing Content? (Score:3)
Privacy?
The freedom and safety of not having a permanent record?
A culture of taking online the normal unrecorded stream-of-consciousness interaction between friends?
Is this appropriate for companies who deliver news?
Is there a reduction in creating and publishing things worth preserving, or is it just a case of the separate normal ephemera of life being taken online?
Will we, or youth, always share so much online, or is it a fad because the tools are new?
Re:Why Disappearing Content? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are today's kids so fond of the ephemeral?
The conversations I used to have down the pub back before mobile phones were generally a thing were ephemeral. The nice thing is that of course you could (and did!) talk utter shite and it generally wouldn't come back to haunt you. Likewise, I could drivel on the phone (rotary dial, too) for bloody hours with much the same effect.
I'm guessing that the yoof of today wants to interact in much the same way, except the world has moved on and communication is via the 'tubes these days. They seem to have quite sensibly realised that having all the crap be ephemeral by default (like it used to be) is much better than having the crap you wrote when you were 15 and angsty come back because Zuckerberg decided to tweak the privacy settings again.
You know, back in the day, I had a geocities page. Black background. And it scrolled metallica lyrics along the status bar at the bottom using some javascript snippet. Fuck me I'm glad that's vanished into the void and that I didn't use my real name on it.
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How about instead... (Score:2)
Videos will only be temporarily visible? (Score:1)
No thank you (Score:2)
Skype is useful for:
1) Multi-way business meetings with video
2) Calling phone numbers in other countries without messing with phone cards, etc.
3) screen sharing.
If you want to make Skype more useful, add desktop sharing/control.
The people I have on my Skype list are NOT people I want to social network with. The birthdays from old business contacts are annoying enough ...
You cunts (Score:2)
You fucking cunts at Microsoft just can't help screwing shit up, can you?
I don't want some craptastic "social-messaging and sharing" platform, I just want to make some fucking video calls to a few people.
You shitbags from Microsoft should all die in a fire.
I swear, if I had an orbital weapons platform, Redmond would be burnt off the face of the Earth with a concentrated energy beam and the churning pit of molten magma that I'd turn their campus into wouldn't cool down for 100 years.
Next week, adding grocery app for lutefisk! NO. (Score:1)
NO. If I wanted glitzy-ass social networking, I'd go for some. And here I recently got plenty riled up with these people enough for...
1) Tying Skype updates to Windows Store (comes with free complaints over decided inability to use far earlier versions... you know, without bloat, but that's a given)
2) Taking away themes (no option to white and blue Skype was a pain when by necessity working in a dark room in the middle of the night with a dark theme), followed by...
3) Giving me the option of trying a newfan