Released yesterday, Skype Toolbars beta works only with Internet Explorer at this time. I downloaded to my Tablet PC which has Skype running the most often to see what features and functions this added and also to see if it hogged a full line like some toolbars do. Space is at a premium in the toolbar world and sorry, but Skype functionality is not really worth a full bar. Here’s some quick thoughts and observations:

- The Skype program must be running as it uses the toolbar uses the Skype API. Bummer, I was hoping this would be an alternative way to run Skype. Having to run both is just hogging more resources.
- It uses about 50% of a 1024×768 line in IE. Too much, considering it adds a rather unnecessary Google search bar.
- The “Page Contacts” function remains grayed out when I visit pages with people’s Skype names on it. Maybe I don’t understand how this is supposed to work but I thought if it encountered a name of a Skype user on a page it gave me the option to call them? That would be cool if it worked that way, the only problem is it doesn’t work.

I tested by visiting the home page of MakeYouGoHmm and my name TDavid is clearly on that page in the About section. Still grayed out. So next I went to Skype Journal where Bill Campbell and Stuart Henshall’s names are listed. Still grayed out. Lastly, I did a Google search through the toolbar (more on that in a minute) for “TDavid” and it was still grayed out. Then I tried the same Google Search for Stuart Henshall. No luck there I started entering in common names like: Bill, John, Mike and the same grayed out box in every case. What gives?

- Why should I want or need another Google search box? Skype should have included only Skype-related functions, not Google-related functionality. If I want a Google search then I’ll use the desktop search or Google’s own toolbar … how many Google search buttons in the browser does one need? Vendors need to stop including Google — or other search — with every toolbar. One search for mulitple engines, like can be done with the MakeYouGoHmm toolbar or Firefox toolbar is good enough for most users. Worse yet, there is no way that I saw to remove that from the Skype toolbar. For this reason alone the toolbar would be uninstalled, even if the rest of it was useful.

Skype promises: “[the toolbar] recognizes phone numbers and Skype Names on web pages so that you can call them with one click.”

I decided to try a page with my Skype phone number on it by intentionally adding to my Just bought SkypeIN page. I navigated to the page with the toolbar enabled (pictured above) and right away the toolbar turned from gray to black and a window hovered when I moused over the phone number with a Skype icon next to it. So apparently it works better off Skype phone numbers than Skype usernames.

As an additional test I added my business line phone number to the same page and refreshed to see what happened. This broke the link. Seems like the regular expression logic for this Page Contacts function is buggy. Either that or the database calls are wrong. Whatever the case, this toolbar in its current condition is about as useful to me as breasts on a boar. The one positive thing I can point to is that in the options dropdown they made it easy and obvious how to uninstall. Good job there.

I took the hint and did just that.

• Henshall launches Skype Journal
• Skype turns one and has 100,000 paid skype-out subscribers
• Ale-Then-Bud, what does your phone number spell?
• Skype public API
• Skype over two million online and almost 75 million downloads
• Yay or nay: Skype now being downloaded in Kazaa