Skype – the master of parallel universes

For reasons that I totally don’t understand, many companies choose Skype as a standard communication application.  I’d understood such a decision if they were using voice or video calls.  But they don’t.  Chat only.  And pretty much everyone knows how horrible Skype is for chats.  It’s slow, often losing offline messages, its history management is horrible, etc, etc, etc.  But today’s post is not about that.

It’s about parallel universes.  And how Skype is the master of them.  Consider my example from this morning.   I came to work, logged in to Skype, saw who is online and started chatting with one of the co-workers.  In the meantime, a guy next to me was doing exactly the same thing – came in, logged in to Skype, saw who is online, and started chatting with another co-worker.  But the interesting bit was that we couldn’t see each other online.  If we tried to send messages or files to each other, they’d fail complaining that the other party is offline.  The same was true for those co-workers with who we were chatting, they couldn’t see the other half of the office, which was online, chatting, and couldn’t see the first half of the office.

Is there any other explanation except that Skype managed to create at least two separate, parallel universes and signed in half of our office into one universe, and the second half of the office into another universe?  I can’t think of one…

Day in brief

Mark Malkoff Gets Carried in New York City

I’ve posted here about Free Hugs campaign some time ago.  Today I came across an experiment with a smaller goal, but of the same sociality (if there is even such a word).  Mark Malkoff gets a free ride across Manhattan island on the backs of total strangers, proving once again that this world is full of good, fun, strong and crazy people.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi4ClspNrNs]

Google Calendar wishlist

Google Calendar team recently ran a survey, asking users what is it that they like and dislike about the product and how to make it better.  Of course, I submitted my opinions, but, as always, better thoughts come after the action has been already taken.  Here is my two items wishlist for Google Calendar.

  1. [Update: not true anymore, see comments] SMS notifications for additional calendars.  Google Calendar only supports SMS notifications for your primary calendar.  But if you want to have a separate calendar for work and personal life, then you’ll have to choose which of these will send you messages to the phone.
  2. Related events.  Quite often I get into a situation where I need two related entries in the calendar.  For example, I might have a birthday party event and shopping for presents, or a beer session at the pub and table reservation.  Having just one event and a tonne of reminders for it doesn’t really work.  Having two events however makes it more difficult to manage them.  If the party was rescheduled, I’ll need to update my calendar to reflect the change, but I’ll also need to find and update the related event.  It would be so much more convenient if I could just relate one event to another and when I move one (a couple of days later, for example), the related event would reschedule itself as well.

What are the features that you want to see Google Calendar?