Skype's Antoine Bertout argues that this move to shut down Extras was inevitable as "not enough people were using them to justify our continued support of the Extras programme." We have to wonder, though, if killing off a good part of its third-party developer ecosystem is really the right thing to do. After all, applications like Pamela, Skylook, or Pretty May added important functions to Skype and made the software more useful for a larger group of users.

Of course, this is not necessarily the end of the road for third-party developers who really want to write applications for Skype. The company, however, will not actively promote these apps and they won't be certified. For developers, this means that they are now on their own and can't expect any more help from the company.

Skype itself is clearly making these decisions in order to trim unnecessary expenses from its books as its new owners are looking for ways to make the company operate more efficiently. It could also be that Skype plans to enable some of the services that the third-party Extras plugins currently offer in its own core client.

With the public API still being open, we are not ready to declare the death of the Skype ecosystem just yet, but developers will surely be wary of Skype and might just shy away from developing for a platform whose future looks uncertain.

If you want to save some extra money and you don't need Google Voice to forward any of your SMS messages to your phone because you're at your computer anyway, make sure you turn off SMS forwarding under Settings -> Phones -> Edit.

While Google Voice is still an invite-only service, Google is slowly opening the service up to more users. Apple, of course, is still 'reviewing' whether it will allow the Google Voice iPhone app into the App Store, but there can be no doubt that Google Voice has the potential to drive some revenue away from cell phone carriers. International calls are cheap, transcribed voicemails that are forwarded to your email are free, you can easily record calls, and you don't need to pay for SMS messages you receive. Over time, Google will surely add a few more features to Google Voice (and maybe bring back some features it dropped from GrandCentral's original feature set). Users still have to connect calls through the cell phone carriers' traditional phone network, but that's about the only service a user would need from AT&T and Co (besides a data plan, of course).

We have used Google Voice ever since it was still GrandCentral (Google acquired GrandCentral in July 2007) and couldn't be happier with the service, so here is our rundown of what you can expect once you get your own Google Voice number.

How Does it Work?

Just like GrandCentral did when it was still available, Google Voice (GV) will assign you a new number, and then you can set up GV to forward calls from this number to your cell phone, home phone, or office.

For calls within the US, GV also allows you to place free calls, though instead of running through a flash widget or a desktop app, GV will actually call your phone and then place the call, so you will still use your cell phone minutes. Google Voice also offers cheap international calls with prices that rival those of Skype and Vonage.

Nothing on your own phone changes, of course, so when you place a call, your home or cell phone number still appears on your friend's caller ID, though you can always opt to call your own GV number first and then connect the call from there.

GV features a Gmail-like, stripped down interface that puts transcribed voicemails and recent calls at the center of the screen, with the ability to also see recently placed and received calls, your contacts, and other standard features you would expect from a telephony app.

Our Favorite Features

• transcribed voicemails: whenever somebody leaves a voicemail, GV will transcribe the message as best it can (this only works for English right now). These transcripts are then forwarded to your email account and you can also opt to receive an SMS notification.
• listening in to voicemails: whenever you receive a call and decide to let it go to voicemail, you can also choose to listen in and even pick up the call if it turns out to be an important message. This feels just like the old days when answering machines with tapes were still a novelty.
• call screening: one neat option in GV is the ability to screen calls. If you activate this feature, callers will be prompted to leave their name once they call, and once you pick up the phone, GV will play the name back and you can choose if you want the call to go to voicemail or if you want to actually speak to this person. You can opt to let all unknown callers who are not in your Google address book go through this procedure or just those calls from callers who have blocked their caller ID.
• recording calls: at any time during a call, you can press 4 and the call will be recorded. This only works for calls you receive on your phone for now, and doesn't work for outgoing calls.
• conference calls: just ask participants to call your GV number and once more callers call in, you can just conference them in - this works for up to 4 callers.
• switching phones: if you want to switch phones during a call (say you took a call on your home phone and decide you want to take a walk and continue the call on your cell), just press * and all the other phones will ring.
• SMS: you can send and receive text messages from your GV account
• integration with Google Contacts
• it just works: the call quality is good, we didn't experience any outages during the last few months, and calls aren't dropped. GV does what it says it does, and it does it well.

But What About Making Calls from my Phone?

As we mentioned above, making calls from your own phone will still display your old caller ID, but at least if you have an iPhone, you do have the option to use GV Mobile, which provides a nice phone interface and comes in a free (iTunes link) and paid version (iTunes link).

A Few Things We Would Like to Change

• the ability to set your cell phone to display your GV number in the caller ID  - this is still a big barrier for users who might otherwise be willing to switch. As long as your old number still appears in the caller ID, others will continue to call you on that number and will continue to route around your fancy new GV account with all its bells and whistles.
• no call chains: you can't set one phone to ring first and then, when nobody picks that up, transfer the call to the next number (GrandCentral offered this feature)

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In ten years time we may look at Skype in the same way we look at Amazon and Google, as a huge built-to-last company, for these ten reasons:

1. It has revenue, about $500 million in 2008. Ahem, only in the strange world of Web 2.0 is that considered remarkable. I love using Twitter, but without sustainable revenue their future has to be in question.
2. It is profitable. We're talking "high-teen margins," according to eBay's CEO at the Accel Symposium. That does put it in a different league. It means they can survive the harshest of economic climates. If Facebook is having to raise money in these markets their model must be fundamentally flawed, which means their time as an independent company may be limited. To control your own destiny, you need to be profitable.
3. Skype's growth is accelerating in a tough market. Skype is publicly talking about growth rates of 30% to 40%. That's not bad in an economy where flat is the new 30%. Skype has the perfect recession pitch: cut costs now! This shows in its most recent numbers. In the last quarter, Donahoe told us that Skype-to-Skype grew 73% and Skype Out grew 63%.
4. Disruptive technology. Disruptive technology is an over-hyped term, but in this case it really fits. Skype's peer to peer technology enables them to dramatically under-price the competition and still make money. New users don't cost much money - compare that with Facebook and YouTube. Even better, each new user that comes on improves the service for others - the core P2P proposition.
5. Viral marketing. Skype is the perfect viral business. I have lost count of the number of people I have told about Skype, for the simple reason that I want to communicate better/cheaper with them. Many of them are doing the same.
6. Massive market with vulnerable incumbents. $2 trillion is a lot of money. That is the size of the global telecom market. As to vulnerable, how many people feel so loyal to their telephone company that they won't switch to get lower prices? Yes, when Skype dominates the market it won't be worth $2 trillion any more. Even if it is worth 25% of that, say $500 billion, that is OK for the dominant player. Faced with the Skype threat, incumbents have a horrible innovator's dilemma. To really match Skype will destroy their current business even faster.
7. Just wait until it bites into those cell phone bills. Skype on mobile phones - really native Skype you can use for free wherever there is WiFi - has been possible technically for some time. This has been held back by the mobile operator's head lock on the device manufacturers. At some point the dam will break. Consumers pent up anger over nickle and diming cell phone bills will ensure that a real alternative will be welcomed.
8. Skype is totally mainstream. This is not about being hip or early adopter. Just show the video conversation to anybody with loved ones in distant places. You will see the surprise and amazement that makes it seem like magic.
9. It is a sticky service. Google still gets my business because they are better than the alternatives. But switching to an alternative will be totally simple. When somebody suggests using something other than Skype, I resist. I have my contacts in there, know exactly how it works and have integrated some external tools. Skype can continually add new features to make the experience better as our hunger for communication is pretty well limitless.
10. Skype can do an IPO. For anyone younger than 30, we should probably spell that out: Initial Public Offering. We keep being told that the IPO market is moribund because of Sarbanes-Oxley. Baloney! The IPO market is moribund because we have lacked profitable high-growth companies that move into huge markets.

My prediction is that as soon as market conditions improve, eBay will sell Skype through an IPO. Their shareholders will pressure them to do so. There is no synergy logic in being part of eBay. The value of Skype is obscured by the problems in eBay's core business. The Skype IPO can be early in the market recovery, as their story resonates so well in a recession (markets usually recover well before the economy recovers).

Who Else?

Who else can take the title "biggest winner from the Web 2.0 era"?

• Google: not really Web 2.0, though; born in 1999.
• YouTube: still losing money, no clear monetization model, and video-serving costs are substantial. It is hard to imagine YouTube as an independent company
• Facebook: how long can the great hope remain the great hope? At some point, it has to demonstrate a sustainable revenue model and some profit. It still doesn't have a native revenue model that makes sense to both users and advertisers.
• Twitter: see above.
• Salesforce.com: not really Web 2.0 either; born in 1999. More revenue than Skype today, but smaller addressable market.

In fact this is already starting to happen, as recent iPhone releases from Google and Say Where show.

Will all this happen in 5 years? While at least one Slashdot commenter thinks it'll be more like 15 years, we see plenty of evidence of voice recognition software on the Web already. Just a week or so ago Google released an update of its Google Mobile App for the iPhone (iTunes link), which included voice recognition to translate voice commands into search queries. In our tests, we found the voice recognition to be very accurate. Google also offers voice search through GOOG-411 and Yahoo and other information providers offer similar services. There are a whole host of talking search engines in fact. Also, we're seeing voice apps from startups - such as the Say Where iPhone application (our review).

Here are the full 5 predictions from IBM:

• Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
• You will have a crystal ball for your health
• You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back
• You will have your own digital shopping assistants
• Forgetting will become a distant memory

Microsoft Office

Out of the two announcements, Microsoft's is probably the least exciting, but, on the other hand, there is a good chance that it will see a lot more actual use than JaJah's voice translation. The Microsoft Research Machine Translation team has just released this update to MS Office 2003 and 2007 to the Office team for integration, but they already offer instructions on their blog for setting this up yourself without having to wait for the official update.

The integration with Windows Live Translator allows you to translate English texts into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as vice versa. We have tested the Windows Live Translator and the translations were generally about as accurate as you would expect from machine translations. There are various mistakes and words it doesn't recognize, but overall, the translation is relatively readable and gives you at least some impression of the original text.

JaJah Babel

JaJah Babel is clearly the sexier product of the two. You can call access numbers in the U.S., England, or Australia, and after a voice prompt, you simply speak the text you want to be translated into Mandarin. The service will then replay your message, you acknowledge the accuracy of the input, and after a short delay, you will hear the translation. Given our general lack of knowledge when it comes to Mandarin here, we can't vouch for the accuracy of the translation, but the service itself worked very well and seemed to understand at least our initial input accurately.

If you are in China, of course, the fact that you have to call an international number to get this to work is a bit of a limitation.

Other Translation Services

There seems to be quite an interest in working on consumer oriented translation services right now. Just yesterday, we wrote about Mloovi, which translates RSS feeds trough Google Translate, and earlier last month, we wrote about the collaborative dictionary and translation service Lingro.

Babel Fish

JaJah's product is especially interesting here because it takes speech as its input and it will get even more interesting once it works for other languages beyond Mandarin as well. JaJah is offering this service based on IBM's technology, and given IBM's expertise in doing voice-to-voice translation, it will probably only be a matter of time before we see support for more languages. Besides other projects, IBM already supports the U.S. Army with an English to Iraqi Arabic translation service.

There has always been a lot of hype around the possibilities of instant voice translations, but very few products were ever good enough to make it in the consumer/business market. JaJah represents a major step forward here, even if its voice prompts make the service a bit less frictionless than the science-fiction ideal if autmated, instant translation.

Lately there has been a lot of talk about new VoIP services that work without needing to be on your computer. Tonight two announcements were made:

1) Jajah Mobile, which claims to take the computer out of the Jajah equation. Now you can make Jajah calls directly from your existing mobile phone.

2) Rebtel, a VoIP company which offers unlimited international calling from mobile phones for $1 per week, has just announced it has received $20 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital (the news was actually leaked to the Business 2.0 blog earlier). According to the official press release, the funds will be used "to advance Rebtel's rapid growth, expand business development and marketing efforts, and accelerate expansion into more countries around the world."

VoIP leaders Skype and Vonage also both have VoIP phone-to-phone services on the market. In January this year Skype released a number of WiFi and Internet phones at CES. The NETGEAR Skype WiFi Phone is a good current example.

Wide open market

Michael Arrington wrote an interesting post about all the new VoIP phone services popping up currently:

"But a new crop of companies have a launched that are trying to let people make free or cheap VOIP calls from a normal POTS (plain old telephone service) phone (often a cell phone) to another POTS phone. If someone gets it right, there’s a huge market out there to destroy. The problem is that no one has gotten it right. And the mass market won’t adopt these services until they are dead simple to use."

What's most interesting to me about Rebtel and Jajah is that they both are potentially disruptive services to the traditional telecoms industry, a la Skype a year or two ago. Of course Skype and Vonage are also in that category. But the point is it's still wide open, because nobody has yet made VoIP super-easy to use on normal phones (landline or mobile).

As a side note, Index Ventures now has investments in FON (a WiFi sharing network), Skype and Rebtel. A nice little combo there.

Not simple enough... yet

Jajah packed and ready for action at DEMO

Not everyone agrees that the new lot of VoIP services is hard to use. But to me the process still seems a little intimidating for 'normal' users. For example here's how Jajah's Frederik Hermann explained to me process for Jajah Mobile:

"How it works - in short, you go to the Jajah site, look to see if your phone is currently supported - the first phones supported are Symbian based, like Nokia N70 and Java based such as the Nokia 6630 (J2ME). We are adding phones everyday and the software is done for many phones. [...] If your phone is supported, you pull down a small plugin. Your phone will then know that when you dial an international number, it will send the call through the Jajah "network" (you can change theses preferences if you wish and make only some calls, or all calls, go through Jajah)."

It may be a one-off set-up process, but it certainly hasn't got that "You've got mail!" simplicity to it... yet. But then breaking a disruptive technology into the market is never easy! So I'm betting that one of these current crop of startups does disrupt the telecoms market, if only because I'd back Index Ventures' track record on this any day :-)