Saturday, 7 October 2006

Is Skype the New SmarTag?

Robert Scoble talks about Skype’s new 'Click to Call' feature in its latest beta. What does it do? Well, it turns a phone number like 425-205-1921 into a clickable number (using Skype).

Skype gets installed on lots of machines so this functionality makes it possible to do a lot more calls. "I click the number and Skype calls it. I don’t need my cell phone anymore", Scoble writes.

Microsoft had tried a similar utility in its IE 6 betas, but got negative criticism as the company was putting advertisements on top of the user’s content. According to Richard Brownell, Skype is giving you a voluntary feature that you can control independent of the browser it would be happening on. Microsoft wanted to force your browser to show you advertisements where advertisements were not meant to be and share none of the money with you.

Skype is only capable of phone calls and messaging so that’s all it would be doing with your browser’s text. The major difference between this and Microsoft’s smarttags is that if you uninstalled IE6 and that was your only web browser, you no longer had Internet (and if you were successful in uninstalling it, you probably also destroyed Windows), Brownell writes.