Skype 2.5 and Skypecasts preview out now

Skypecasts seems to have generated the most buzz. I’m still having a hard time embracing the magnitude of this. Everyone has their hopes up, but note that Skypecasts is called a “preview”, which means “before beta”. There are many things still missing or broken there.

With just a few tweaks, Skypecasts will be an ideal podcasting mechanism. First and the obvious one is recording. Doesn’t mean that Skype itself has to do it, although eventually we will. But already now, there are many plugins like Pamela which do a great job at that. (I just tried the latest Pamela. It is absolutely idiot-proof, meaning no messing around with install — just works, and works great.) So all we need to do is to let you provide a link to the recording which may easily be hosted somewhere else.

Second is to let you run your podcast on Skypecasts — group different episodes in the same collection. I haven’t really done any proper podcasts, but it’s my impression there is currently no idiot-proof way to do those — you need to mess around with files and hosting and recording and uploading and all that detail. Now there are things like Evoca that work great, but are geared more around recording single talks, rather than calls.

Plus for business purposes obviously, limited-participation and limited-visibility Skypecasts would be a good idea. Have your own business directory with casts related to your business? Record the weekly management call and let other staff access it later?

Many ideas. Too many? I’m concerned about us being able to package and cross-link all the offerings in a meaningful way and keep the simplicity and ease-of-use that we so cherish. The above business directory idea would obviously be have to be linked somehow to Skype for Business control panel, as having several incompatible offerings under the same Business name would be just silly. (Just to be clear — all of the above is not the actual roadmap and may have some or zero correlation to what’s actually going to happen… just some random thoughts at 2am

Today was definitely a very encouraging kick-off to all of the above. We’ll see where and how we get with all this.