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.

The fact that eBay and Skype make strange bedfellows does not mean Skype doesn't have a business model. On the contrary, the business generated revenues of $551 million in 2008, which is a 44% increase year-over-year and represents a 21% profit margin for them. The press releases also states a projected revenue of $1 billion in 2011, twice as much as in 2008.

With promising sales, high adoption rates and an openness to new platforms such as their iPhone app, its not hard to think that Skype will have a booming IPO, and will remove the albatross status from eBay, which can return to its core strengths of online payments and e-commerce.

In addition to screen sharing, Skype 2.8 promises to offer a number of other features including improved chat and per-minute calling access via wifi hotspots like Boingo.

Granted, screen sharing has been available through Skype add-ons, but having the features core to the client - and easily accessible - will only help increase the use of Skype for these kinds of online conversations.

Perhaps more importantly for Skype, it's something which is sure to attract new users. At five years old, Skype is among the old guard of this generation of Web apps. This long-awaited screen sharing feature could help revitalize the product, encouraging a whole new crop of business users to add Skype to their cadre of online tools.

And when you couple these new features with Skype's latest hire, it leads one to wonder if 2009 could be a comeback year for the company.

The latest version isn't available for download yet, but it is slated to be released on Tuesday, January 6.

[Update] The download is now available.

Thanks to this update, Mac users (who use the latest beta version) can now also finally share their screens with PC users, which wasn't possible until now.

Overall, while it works perfectly well, Skype's screen sharing features are pretty basic and allow users to either share the full screen or select a part of the screen they want to share. A number of third-party developers already offered Skype plugins that allow users to share their screens with their contacts. And quite a few of these offer a wider range of features than Skype's own solution, including white-board functionality.

The image of the screen is great, as one would expect. But in order to share a screen, a voice call has to be initiated, which might not always be what you really want to do, especially if you are like a lot of us here at RWW who often use Skype for text-only chats as well. Sadly, it also doesn't look like it is possible to share a screen with a group of contacts or a Skype room. For now, you will still need dedicated screen sharing programs like Yuuguu for this kind of functionality.

More New Features

Skype also added additional support for visually impaired users who use screen reading software, as well as birthday reminders that will alert you when it's one of your contacts' birthdays.

As always, we need to point out that this is beta software and you might still find some bugs in it. Overall, though, Skype's beta releases have generally been very stable. A full set of release notes is available here (PDF).

One of the most commonly requested features by Skype forum users is the ability to use the telephony tool from a USB flash drive. As yet, Skype has not got around to making an official portable version and even the John Haller PortableApps website, which has made portable versions of everything from Mozilla Firefox to Sudoku, doesn't seem to be in any hurry to make a portable version of Skype either.

The reluctance is inexplicable, because a portable version of Skype could take off in a big way due to the enormous popularity of USB flash drives. For a start, businesspeople on trips could plug their portable Skype into computers which don't already have the Skype application downloaded, in order to make contact with the office or clients. Tourists could also plug their USB drives into internet cafe computers and run portable Skype to call home or keep in touch with friends all over the world. Being portable, any identifying information that Skype produces would be written onto the USB stick and not on the host computer, which is ideal for people who are not inclined to log into their Skype accounts on a computer they don't know or trust, for fear of leaving behind sensitive information.

However, it IS technically possible to make an unofficial portable version of Skype yourself and here's how you do it.

Next, inside the Skype Portable folder, make another new folder and name it "data". Inside the data folder, open a new file with Microsoft Notepad.    Name the file "skype.bat" and inside this notepad file, place the following line: skype.exe /datapath:"Data" /removable . Save and close.

Move the entire Skype Portable file over to your USB flash drive. Congratulations, you now have a working portable version of Skype which can be run from a USB drive. A bit rough and ready, but it does the job.

Considering how easy this process is, it's mystifying why Skype is dragging their heels bringing out an official portable version of their software. It's true that there is a portable version pre-installed on the SanDisk U3 Cruzer Smart Drive, but what is really needed is an all-purpose portable version which can be used on all USB drives, not just the U3. The U3's exclusivity is a lot like Microsoft forcing you to use their software by having it pre-installed at the factory - and that doesn't bode well for user choice and freedom.

Mark O’Neill is a freelance writer, editor and blogger. He can be contacted on Skype via the username camelot2302

Much has been written about Internet Telephony product Skype and its potential to completely revolutionize the telecommunications market (when it's not suffering major outages!), but as yet not much has been written about Skype's extras. When you download Skype, you are given a basic shell of a program and it's up to you to populate that empty shell with the features you need. How many Skype users realise there is an extras manager attached to Skype? If you have never heard of it before, go to Tools > Do More > Organise your Extras.

With a little bit of extra searching, you can find great add-ons for Skype that have the potential to aid your productivity and even revolutionize your business if you are self-employed. These are often free useful extras, developed through Skype's API. Some are approved by Skype, most are not. In this post we'll explore the Unyte Application Sharing extra, a desktop sharing app for Skype that is similar to Webex or GoToMeeting.

It is perfectly safe and the other user only sees what you want them to see. They don't have access to any other part of your computer and you can instantly revoke access at the press of a button.

The only drawback to the free version is that you can only share with one user at a time. To share with more than one user at a time (say for conference calls), you need the pro version. Prices start from $30 a year.

Mark O’Neill is a freelance writer, editor and blogger. He can be contacted on Skype via the username camelot2302

Today, many a virtual business can only run thanks to Skype's ability to bypass the expensive phone networks. Here at RWW, we use Skype extensively throughout the day, and while other products like Gizmo might offer a similar feature set, nobody else ever got the market penetration that Skype got thanks to its early start.

EBay

But besides all the technical innovation, Skype's biggest news day came in September 2005, when it was acquired by eBay for a staggering $2.6 billion dollars. It doesn't seem as if anybody ever really understood why eBay decided to buy Skype and go ahead with this deal - or why they ever offered this much money in the first place. eBay never integrated Skype into the rest of its business and it was never quite clear how they would do that anyway, besides giving potential buyers an option to connect with sellers through it. In recent months, rumors have flared up repeatedly that eBay was trying to sell off Skype.

Skype 4

The user interface of Skype 4, which is publicly available, but still in beta, is a radical departure from the previous versions and hasn't exactly received many accolades for its new design yet. Skype is trying to put more emphasis on 'conversations,' but in doing so, the company has abandoned the typical horizontal IM layout for one large window with your contacts list and conversations all in one. This tends to take up a lot of space, though you can pop out chat or call windows.

Overall, we are not big fans of the direction Skype is going in with this new version, but given that it is still in beta, hopefully some of the UI weirdnesses will have been addressed by the time it launches. In order to focus its business more, Skype also just announced that it will disable Skypecasts, Skype's ability to broadcast to a large group of listeners, effective September 1st.

For the next five years, Skype's Josh Silverman says that he wants to see Skype move towards 'liquid communication,' where neither device nor place matters.

After the highly anticipated Skype application was released a couple of weeks ago, it quickly became one of the most popular applications in the iTunes App Store and has already been downloaded over 2 million times. However, for jailbroken iPhone owners, the Skype application was unstable, often freezing up and crashing on a regular basis.

The problem has to do with a jailbreak package called the "Mobile Substrate," reports the iPhone Hacks blog. This package is used by a number of jailbreak applications including Winterboard, Clipply, Lockdown, Five Icon Dock, and more. The solution is to download the latest update for the Mobile Substrate package which the developer and Cydia creator, Jay Freeman, has now released.

The Problem with Jailbreaking

It's apparent that Skype didn't want to be blamed for the problems that only affected the jailbreaking crowd. Since they obviously can't stop people from downloading or using their app, they put in the disclaimer to cover themselves from any complaints or liabilities.

This issue, however, highlights the problems of having the jailbreaking community underground and unsupported. Although the EFF is pushing the U.S. Copyright office to grant a DMCA exception so users can jailbreak their phones without fear of penalties, they have not yet been successful in doing so. If that was to pass, it would legitimize jailbreaking and that would mean iPhone developers would have to consider how their applications worked with the others outside of the App Store.

An issue like the one Skype had could possibly even have been discovered prior to launch by testing the app on jailbroken devices, then working with or simply alerting the developer of the app that caused the issues. But because jailbreaking is still considered this "naughty thing" some people do to their phones (instead of the incredible thing it really is), app developers don't have to test their apps or support apps running on the hacked devices. Is that OK? We guess that it is, considering the situation, but we're not happy about it.

Release notes are here, download is here. To be honest, we had some trouble in testing a few of the new features, though they'd been present in the beta version. If you haven't been using the beta, you'll want to upgrade now.

You can now receive a notification whenever any of your contacts change their mood status. This is turned on by default but can be opted-out of in preferences. About this Skype says "It's a bit like Twitter, but don't tell them we said that." That's true, it is a little like Twitter. Delivery of notifications really could provide incentive for people to change their status messages more often, though it would be nice to be able to opt-out on a person by person basis.

You can now assign one through three exclamation points to the chats in your chat drawer. We couldn't tell what that really does other than add a visual symbol though, so it's not clear how useful this will be.

Mac users now have beta access to a feature called Skype Access, which is said to allow purchase of connectivity to public wifi hotspots through your Skype account. We haven't been able to test this yet but if it works at Starbucks, that's going to be hot. Connectivity is purchased at 19 cents per minute, or about $10 per hour, which might seem high but could really come in handy in a pinch.

The ability to write notes to go along with your contacts' profile pages in your account is something that all social networks ought to offer. Each Skype contact now has a blank notes field that you can flip to with a click. That's very nice.

The chat management interface and options have changed substantially as well. All in all, this is a very nice update to the Mac client for Skype. It's nice to see Mac users getting some love; Skype users on Windows have long received more development attention. The fact that Skype keeps moving forward is just one more reason this hugely valuable tool deserves more credit than it often gets.

Online telephony service Skype will be sold by eBay to a group of private investors, possibly including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's new venture capital group, and the deal will be announced on Tuesday according to a report by a team of reporters from the New York Times.

EBay faces legal challenges from Skype's founders that the company said earlier this summer could mean the end of Skype as we know it. From an innovation perspective, we're always excited when such an interesting company breaks free from a slow-moving monolith that acquired it.

If the Times report is accurate it will be very interesting to see who runs the new Skype and what kinds of changes are made to the service. With $600 million in reported annual revenue and nearly twice as many users as Facebook, Skype's international network of P2P software installs powering multimedia communication, file-sharing, chat and status still has boundless potential to do interesting things.

Update: PaidContent's coverage points out that TechCrunch broke this story three days ago.

In today's increasingly virtual and fragmented workforce, a service such as GrandCentral is an ideal complement to other Web Office tools such as GTalk, Gmail and Docs&Spreadsheets. As Josh Catone wrote in his post Rolling Your Own Online Office, the key to a successful distributed team is communication. And GrandCentral is a service that makes telephone communication much easier and gives more control to the user - e.g. you can set rules as to what calls you accept and when, and even hear why someone is calling before taking the call.

I think this will also ruffle some feathers at Skype/eBay. I use Skype a lot - and I have a Skype-In San Francisco phone number, because even though I live in New Zealand the center of my work existence is Silicon Valley (and 50% of R/WW readers come from the US, compared to just 0.8% from my home country). Skype-In is a handy service, although the call quality tends to be poor. But GrandCentral appears to offer a lot of compelling features, which may in time make my Skype-In number redundant.

Unfortunately, right now the GrandCentral service is restricted to those who have a U.S. telephone number and also the service isn't accepting new users at this time. However you can "reserve" a number by submitting your name and email address. I can't wait to try it out. Game on Skype! This is the sort of functionality we'll expect in online telephony services from now on, so Skype needs to step up to the plate and compete with GrandCentral on features.

What's more, once again Google has positioned itself at the leading edge of innovation in an emerging Web Office market segment. They did it with wikis (JotSpot), online word processing (Writely), email (Gmail), RSS (Feedburner) and perhaps with presentation software too.

Joseph Galante at Bloomberg News cites Jayanth Angl, an analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, who argues that replacing the technology will not be easy. "It would be quite difficult to replace what they already have as the underlying component to their service," Angl told Bloomberg. "There are a number of barriers to that, not the least of which are legal barriers." The creation of another global P2P VOIP and video network that doesn't infringe on existing patents is no small task.

Skype is one of the shiniest stars in eBay's portfolio of companies and is aimed to spin out as an independent company that can sell its own stock in an IPO sometime soon. That's unlikely to happen until this most important of several lawsuits the company faces is somehow resolved.

This Spring we reported that Skype's founders were also interested in raising enough capital to buy Skype back from eBay. It's been three months since that news was first disclosed and there have been no updates on the effort that we're aware of.

Skype continues to grow very quickly. Now with 480 million users around the world, it is twice the size of Facebook and adding users almost as fast. Skype being gutted would cause substantial disruption to the communication of millions of families around the world.

Zennstrom and Friis sold Skype to eBay for roughly $3 billion in 2005 but no one was quite sure why. The remaining Skype team has done a fair job continuing to innovate inside the much slower moving eBay, but we've got our fingers crossed: a buy-back by the founders would likely put innovation in the driver's seat again at Skype.

It's not been a happy marriage, though. Ebay has suffered an existential crisis, technology integration never came and now a patent fight over the core P2P technology that Skype's inventors retained rights over is going to court. If the details of all the fighting is of interest, that's one more reason to read the Times's reporting on this. What we're interested in is what this could mean for the technology of Skype.

Let's See What They've Got, Again

We want to see Zennstrom and Friis put on the Skype jerseys again and crank one out of the park. The two have been P2P geniuses since the start, they just got some failure out of their systems with Joost and we want to see what they'll do next with a technology we and millions of other people around the world use every day.

Get Skype out of the stuffy old confines of eBay and back in the action! We'd love to see a really strong Skype voice app for Nokia and iPhones that kicks the overstuffed carriers right were it hurts - the time is right now or soon. How about an enlivened developer platform? Those are hipper now than they were when Skype was born! We'd also love to see some enhanced security so people in repressive regimes can use it again without worrying that a back door is going to let them be spied on as the Chinese government has been, for example.

The possibilities are many and we hope that Zennstrom and Friis can do what it takes to retake the wheel. Good luck gathering those billions, guys, a Skype buyback is an exciting thing to think about.

First, let's talk about the interface. In short, it's about as close to the PC/Mac client in style and utility as it can possibly get. Contacts, instant messenger, dialing pad, call history and profile can all be accessed at any time via the navigation bar at the bottom. Here's some more of the primary features:

• Contacts can be listed alphabetically or by who is online.
• You can see all ongoing chats or just new chat messages.
• When calling out, there is a button that links to the iPhone address book.
• Call history can be switched from everything to missed calls.
• The info page lets you update your status (even with a photo!), access your profile, change your status, buy more credit and check your voicemail.

Rest assured the interface is slick and the app works as promised. But, I think the real reason why we are all so excited about this release over other Skype-enabled iPhone apps like Fring or Truphone is simply how much it works like its desktop-bound big brother that we know and love. Instant messaging chats just work. Group chats just work. Getting at-a-glance status on your Skype friends just works. The bottom line is, other apps may get the job done, but due to bad interface design, a critical missing feature, or trying to do too much, are not a pleasure to use. This client actually is a pleasure.

With all that said, it's still not perfect. It's better than everything else Skype-related on the iPhone, yes, but optimally it could support Skype SMS (though the carriers would probably never allow it), notification of new IMs when the app isn't in use (hopefully coming shortly after the iPhone 3.0 firmware hits), and.. well, support for video. Why not? People were recording MMS videos with their cellphones in 2004. The Japanese have had dual-camera phones with live video streaming for quite a while now.

And yes, I do realize the camera is on the back of the iPhone, making it hard to use the screen and the cam at the same time. I don't care. It's time Apple realized people are willing to trade some battery life for the ability to record a short video and start allowing apps that support it. But, until that day comes, Skype for the iPhone is highly recommended. I have already put it up on the first page next to Tweetie and DVR Remote. You can find the link to Skype in the iTunes app store here.

Alex caught me a bit unawares with the podcast, so don't expect any startling insights from me on it. As Alex said, "this is raw" :-) Good fun though and I hope to do more podcast chats with Alex and others. I imagine I'll get better at articulating my thoughts in audio... well I hope so, otherwise I'll have to quickly retire from the podcasting circuit ;-)