this could be blog ... by IBMer: SkypeMania: VOIP rulez

There are some smart people in this world. People who understand the Age of Information (or the age of IT?).

So they gave us things like Kazza, Google, the torrents, mp3's ... and now we got Skype!

A couple of months ago (or was it even earlyer? - in modern times, everything's running so fast!) I heard news about this great tool. My curiosity was hungry as a mad wolf in cold Siberia - so I downloaded it - to check it out. It didn't have many users back then ("just" a couple of million I guess). Since none of my friends had it, and I'm not realy the person who's sending out those "get this tool" e-mails, I forgot about it.

Up untill recently, when I was chatting with my brother on MSN and my trackpoint somehow lead to that voice chat button. As we're both quite crazy about all this stuff, we tryed to connect ... once, twice, ... and it didn't work. I thought it's probably becouse of slow connection - as I'm using VPN over dial-up at home (YES, there are still people with dial up ... especialy those who have fast LAN's at work and don't realy need constant connection at home!).

The idea of talking using the web somehow stayed in my mind and during work, I remembered this skype-thing again. Download, install, send instructions to Bro ... connect in the evening. -Surprise, surprise - it works perfectly fine!

I couldn't believe it - when conn. started, it was a bit weird and I noticed that it wasn't fast as it should be. Couple of moments later, it seemed as it just got optimised to my slow dial-up (45kbps) - it was just like talking over fixed line. With one BIG DIFFERENCE - IT WAS FREE - although I was calling to another country!

So we joined the 22 million+ community of Skypers. I'd recommend it to everyone who wants to talk to others for free.

VOIP rulez.

If you ever tryed one of those IM's, it's gonna be a piece of free cake. And if you haven't ... well,- it's still a child's play. ;-)

Check out the screenshot: