Why I don't put stuff in SkypeFind and how I would fix it

First, the tab sometimes just loads too darn slowly. It’s not responsive and this is annoying. But this is not the main point. Instead, the main reason would be:

I don’t like SkypeFind because I don’t feel that it respects me as a user and person. I like features that are a “win-win” situation. I don’t mind helping businesses if it also helps myself or makes my life better somehow.

I can certainly see how my contribution of listings and reviews to SkypeFind helps Skype. The directory grows more powerful and valuable with each contribution and more and more people will find it useful. If this process becomes large beyond a critical point, Skype will also make some money out of this.

Yet, I can’t see how my contributions would help MYSELF. Let’s put the business and directory aspect aside for a while, and look at SkypeFind from a personal perspective. When seeing it this way, you can think of SkypeFind as a “personal trail”, or a part of your life’s story. You’d be able to recall where and when you went and what you thought of the place. Maybe you liked some place a lot, and you retrieve its info and recall “yes, this was nice” and you’ll then go back and become a regular. Or, if you see that your friend regularly goes to surfing hotels in Tarifa, you may just have discovered his passion and hobby and maybe you could then connect about something that you didn’t know your friend was into. And your lives would then be better.

If you’re a verbal diarrheatic like me, you’d also have easy tools to repost, mix and match this trail, or parts of your life story. You could repost them on your blog or link blogs. You could subscribe to listings by other people. You could build cool mashups around this, say, mixing, slicing and dicing with map data (hot restaurants where Skypers have recently been? Worst mountain skiing resorts to avoid?).

From this aspect, current SkypeFind is useless. I can’t use it as my life’s trail. I can’t even see the listings that I have made myself, let alone subscribe to listings of other people, keywords or locations. There’s just one little thing: on the SkypeFind “opening page” (tab), it shows you “New from friends”. This is the kind of thing that I’m talking about and it’s in the right direction, but it’s very little. Too little for me to care and use the feature.

So, in order to fix this, Skype would need to add more community features and openness to SkypeFind. I don’t know for a fact, but I don’t think they are too happy about its performance. SkypeFind currently shows me that it has “208,625 businesses in 231 countries by 178,094 people”. Are these numbers big? If you compare to, say, population of Tonga (July 2005 estimate 102,000) then yes, sure. Yet when you compare to the total “Skype population”, then it’s a tiny tiny number of people adding listings. Furthermore, you can assume that those trying out the feature are generally active people who like to try new things, both in Skype and in life otherwise. So you could also guess that they would have a great number of business/customer experiences to share. Yet the average is 1.17 listings per person, so most people have only entered one listing — and then been disappointed. My speculation is that at least some part of them are disappointed because of the same reasons that I outlined above — that they can’t capture and follow their own trail.

If Skype added the community features to extract data from SkypeFind in more varieties (RSS feeds by Skype Name would be a great start), it wouldn’t hurt any of SkypeFind’s original objectives. People would still generate and find listings and the directory would grow. But there would be more active use and the directory would be more useful, and eventually, people would make more calls through SkypeFind.

I don’t have a firm idea, but I suspect that the reason why these community features don’t exist, and there’s no web presence of SkypeFind (it only exists currently in the Windows client), is that Skype people think of Find only as a vehicle for generating more SkypeOut calls. (This seems also to be the reason behind why you can’t put a Skype Name for a business, only a SkypeOut number.) I don’t think this is very smart. If I were Skype, I would rather have an open directory with good content and risking losing some of the calls to other channels, instead of a closed walled-garden directory where people can, true, make SkypeOut calls, but since the content is shit, no one will come to search for businesses on it anyway. The gross volume of SkypeOut calls would still be larger in the first case than in the second.

Exposing SkypeFind on the web, even if it were in read-only format, would have some interesting implications from SEM (Search Engine Marketing) perspective. If each listing had a permalink and the pages were constructed well, they would be indexed and ranked fairly highly in search traffic. I don’t know a whole lot about SEM and SEO, but I’ve come to think about it recently a bit and the bottom line is that if you’re a business owner (be it Skype itself, or be it a business that’s listed in SkypeFind), you’d want people to find you through search, be it on Google or SkypeFind or wherever. And if you gave business owners good tools to drive further traffic to the directory, it would increase the growth further. Offer buttons to businesses “Had a good experience with us? Let others know and rate us on SkypeFind!” I haven’t seen any yellow pages providers do that — at least I haven’t seen any such links to directory sites anywhere on small business pages. With Skype’s scale and large volume of users, it would be feasible for them to do this because they would see the rationale behind it — people rate and comment them on SkypeFind, they get instant feedback, and Skype hosts a well-constructed listing for them that’s indexed well in search engines.

Many small businesses don’t know/care about SEO, but if they realized that SkypeFind is actually a vehicle to drive more traffic to them, they would join in promoting and spreading the word. (And another instant function of this is that spam people would jump on SkypeFind, as they already have jumped to Skype Chat. So besides generating some upside, a more open SkypeFind would also need more protection and policing from spam perspective. But I think it’s all solvable.)

So, long story short. Let me see history of my own listings, and let me subscribe to them and other people’s listings through RSS. Then I’d perhaps care more about SkypeFind and even use it sometimes.