The 'body language' of text chat

I think there's a certain 'body language' in text chat. It has to do with showing to the other person when you're typing something. In Skype you can deactivate that option but not in Yahoo Messenger. If you regularly chat with someone they develop a sense of how fast you type and think, therefore, someone can detect when you need time to think of something or whether you're re-typing/editing a text message.

For example if you answer 'yes that's great' to a proposal then depending on the amount of time it took you to write the message the other person could infer that you don't think it's that great. Usually you start typing something then change your mind and want to edit the text, that is a hidden body language that the other person can see. It's not a bad thing but it's something to be aware of.

If you want to avoid being detected that you needed time to think of something, then type in a separate notepad window and cut and paste when ready

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SkypeShare for lower phone bills

You probably know you can make very cheap phone calls with Skype to landlines. Under a monthly subscription of about $12 you can make unlimited calls to more than 40 countries.

SkypeShare is a cheating concept. Share the password to one account with a few others and make unlimited calls driving down the monthly subscription cost even further. To prevent abuse, Skype's fair use policy actually limits 'unlimited use' to 10,000 minutes per month with a maximum of 6 hours per day but still, the restrictions can allow for plenty of time to be shared among a few friends.

Sharing the account could also work with prepaid plans and calls to mobile phones which are more expensive. The idea is nothing new or extraordinary, one account with a shared password to split the monthly subscription bill among a few people. Simple as that!

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Set individual modes for every contact

Invisible mode or any other mode on Skype or Messenger, for example, means that all your contacts will see you in that mode. Why not create a new feature that will allow users to set the mode they want for each contact? For example, contacts John, Mary and Adams are set to 'invisible', contacts Frank and Kathy set to 'away' and contacts Jim and Tony set to 'available' etc. Such feature can be particularly helpful when managing a long list of contacts and you don't want to give the impression that you rarely log on to talk to people.

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Sextimates

When I log into Skype to talk to my girlfriend with whom we are in a long-distance relationship I see that another 12 million people are online and probably chatting or talking to each other. I read in an article yesterday that online communication has helped people maintain long-distance relationships more than in the past. So I always wonder, what percentage of the 12 million people talking for free on Skype are having phone sex? If the percentage is too high, I suggest we introduce a new verb in the English language to describe the activity: ' Phonycate'

On another note, do you think all 12 million Skype users (and probably millions more that use other software or normal phone) experience phonycation once at some point in their lives? What's your guess?

Being hypothetical in my thinking here. What if Skype added to your status the following options:

"Phonycating - Feel Free to Join", or
"Phonycating - Do Not Disturb".

How many people do you think would take advantage of the 'Feel Free to Join' option?

PS: If you vote for my poll below, be honest. I am hoping that if everyone votes honestly, I can get a pretty good sextimate about how many out of the 12 million people or so I see online on Skype phonycate. I tried to ask Skype but they gave some phony reason not to release the data, it was privacy I think...:D:D:D

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Skype 3.0: Make it all free

This thought was posted on Thinkaloo on 22 February 2008 by member dim

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Skype is currently free for a PC to PC call. What if a PC to a fixed line call was also made free and the cost of the calls was paid by ads?

Maybe it could work on a use-per-ad model, where the user makes a free call up to the amount collected for Skype 3.0 through the user clicking and viewing online ads.