Skype Technical Woes Makes It A Non Mission Critical Application

As if Skype didn’t have enough to worry about with Yahoo, now it seems their lack of any real technical infrastructure and their so called “super nodes” an issue in my book.

Anyway what I’ve noticed is that of late Skype is not acting like an IM client, but more like a store and forward service.

This morning, after having on Mac on line for almost the entire weekend, and with Skype loaded a message from Friday came in from a client who had posed a question to me via Skype, while I was offline. It seems that the message was lost somewhere, likely in a super node, or until the specific PC he was on logged back on, it wasn’t sent to me, even if he had already seen it appear on his screen.

I’ve also been noticing or late the text appearing on the top of my screens from time to time “skype has been unable to send the message” or something close to that.

This all speaks to the problem I raised months ago (and never received an answer to) regarding Skype running simultaneously on different end points but only seeing some users on one machine and not the other..Then there is the shadow Skype issue, where you actually log off after a chat with another party, then log back on from a different location, only to be unable to see one another, or worse you see that person but they don’t see you.

These woes seem to be increasing. I suspect it has something to do with the supenodes, but also suspect that it may be version (i.e. beta vs. stable, Mac vs. PC, Pocket PC, etc.) related too.

With this most recent delayed IM text message delivery I’m suspecting that Skype is actually machine ID specific beyond just user name relevant and that is what enables the SuperNode and P2P stuff to work better. But, given how Skype is becoming a tool of many for business, not just social chatters, you get what you pay for. And since Skype is free our complaints are likely not as relevant as they would be to a company which makes money off of their users….

Hopefully some of the more technically savvy folks out there (Aswath, Erik, Alec, Ted, etc.) weigh in with some commentary.