I used to follow and write about Skype frequently, even before it was the internet phenomenon that it is today, but lost most interest once I realized what using it ultimately required. I realized after getting over the initial honeymoon that it was a better voice chat application with a unique (at the time) P2P proprietary solution. However, in the real world I don’t have a dozen different types of telephones connecting through proprietary connections so the real world usefulness of Skype was lost in my daily workflow. We still use it for a few business-oriented applications, but nothing like we did even a year ago.

Now Jan in Malaysia Charlie is claiming he spoke to someone who has cracked the Skype protocol and was given a screenshot of the alleged working app. This mysterious cracker indicates that the code will be opened and available next month somewhere on a China server where eBay will have a hard time reaching and shutting it down.

If this rumor — and remember it is only a rumor — turns to be true, what will be eBay’s next move? Jan Charlie postulates:

So what will be Skype’s response? Perhaps with all the other troubles they are having right now they will hope that this news just fades away. Maybe they will decide to open the Skype protocol to allow others to freely develop applications to work together with the Skype network like Google’s Jingle Protocol for Google Talk. Maybe, but I doubt it. Maybe eBay will use a few of their Millions of dollars to buy up this Chinese company.

As I said last night about Live Messenger and Yahoo communicating with each other: it’s good to see. The internet would be a better place with open standards for IM and VoIP.

Just so it’s clear here, I’m not promoting or condoning the efforts of developers to crack proprietary software, but I would like to see eBay open up the Skype protocol. I don’t believe that will happen any time soon, but it’s the billion dollar hole card that eBay could play.

How much are you skyping these days?

Update 4:03pm PST: Looks like I blew it by identifying a plagiarist instead of the original content author. Thank you for pointing out the original source, Charlie, the link in the post above has been corrected. My apologies for the error. Would have been corrected sooner but I was in the middle of our weekly live radio show. I worry about this stuff from unfamiliar sources. My bad

Did this post make you go hmm?

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