Skype API Beta
Looks like the Skype API is in Beta at the moment.
There’s mass potential in there for people to go out and do great stuff with it!
Perhaps to excite the .NET crowd, someone could create a Managed wrapper for the APIs?
Check out the Skype Developer Zone.
One of the beauties of Skype is that it is free, the other is that it utilises P2P technologies. This is one of the better usages of P2P technology, not all of it is about sharing illegal content (movies/music, and so on).
The advantage of utilising the P2P technology for Skype is that the company, Skype requires very little network infrastructure on their end to keep things rolling.
Here’s a quote from their website:
A true P2P system, in our opinion, is one where all nodes in a network join together dynamically to participate in traffic routing-, processing- and bandwidth intensive tasks that would otherwise be handled by central servers.
– Source.
Decentralized P2P networks have several advantages over traditional client-server networks. These networks scale indefinitely without decreasing search time and without the need for costly centralized resources. They utilize the processing and networking power of the end-users machines since these resources always grow in direct proportion to the network itself. Each new node added to the network adds potential processing power and bandwidth to the network. Thus, by decentralizing resources, second generation (2G) P2P networks have been able to virtually eliminate costs associated with a large centralized infrastructure.
– Source.
Basically, as the amount of users on the network increase, so does the available bandwidth in the P2P network.
This is all quite interesting stuff, have a read of either of the two above links to the same source.