skype: first impressions on 2.0
last night i was chatting with martin, an old college friend of mine, over yahoo and he asked if we can talk. he moved to canada with his family last year. i was able to talk to him before along with a couple more of our friends over at yahoo messenger but last night for some reason his voice came over garbled and choppy. maybe one of the reasons is that i’m using messenger 7.5 beta. so he suggested using skype instead.
i’ve downloaded an early version of skype last year but i don’t remember installing it. i didn’t have a reason to because i didn’t know anyone using skype then. anyway, while chatting, i downloaded version 2.0, installed it and got an account (headlessspider), i performed a search on my friend’s name, added him as a contact, started calling him and we were talking within minutes.
my first impression was how clear martin’s voice was coming in. i have to admit that it was a lot better than my experience with yahoo’s messenger with voice. we talked for about an hour where he showed me his place via yahoo’s web cam (choppy but not pixellated), i showed him my pictures over at flickr and checked out some friends over at yahoo 360. i wasn’t able to use skype’s chat feature since i didn’t know about it and we were already using yahoo.
after the call, i thought that this skype thingy can be used for business calls. so this morning i’m trying to read up on it. the interface is similar to yahoo’s messenger so learning to use the program should be easy enough. although i do have some issues regarding security in p2p programs, this seems to be a pretty good application of p2p telephony. the documentation on web site is very helpful in clarifying some of the issues i have.
just to reassure myself, i took a look at the firewall logs and i didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. i’ll do some more tests when i get the chance but in the meantime, using skype for any type calls going out of the country seems pretty cool. and did i tell you its free?
