Just When You Thought Competition Might Have Won the Battle

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

You actually find out that the competitors might not have beaten it any time soon. Over the last few days I have been creating a number of different weblog entries on a number of different competitors that are starting to come up to continue taking some market share from Skype, one of the most powerful VoIP / IM clients out there. And it all looked like it was going to be a tough time recovering from some major losses, but, wouldn’t you know it, Skype has just come back with a new plugin that will take online real-time collaboration into new heights: Jyve.

As Robin Good has commented already today on Co-Browsing With Skype: New Jyve Plugin Adds Call-Forwarding, Web Presence And Auto-Responders, Jyve is supposed to be the next big thing in the Skype VoIP environment putting together a superb list of new features that will only allow you but to increase your efficiency and effectiveness of using this VoIP client to collaborate with your colleagues at work, or just to get in touch with family and friends. There is a whole bunch of features that Robin describes at his weblog so you may as well want to go there and check them out. Some of them are quite extensive. But just in case you may want to know what they are before you read his weblog post here you have got a brief excerpt:

Web Presence: It will allow you to show your Skype status on any web site, including your own weblog. (Yes, I know, whenever I get a chance I will update elsua to include this new great feature. So stay tuned !)

Browser Sync: Also known as co-browsing, you will be able to browse particular web sites you want to show to others without having to send web links of any kind, just a single click. So sharing web content with other folks is just going to be a whole lot easier now than ever before.

Auto Responder: This is one of my favourite features, along with the co-browsing one, the ability to set up different IM away messages depending on what you are currently doing whether you are close to your computer working on something or away from it. Really nice way as well to use some filters on what goes through, what doesn’t.

Call Forwarding: This feature will just allow you forward Skype calls to your regular phone line or your mobile number.

Jyve Web Tools: An advanced interaction with some of the most popular features Skype has got to offer, like IM, Skype Me, Voicemail, Create Conference, etc. etc.

So as you can see Skype‘s functionality will be boosted a great deal with the Jyve plugin. So if you haven’t had a chance to give it a try yet, you could go and download it from here. I am sure you will be as impressed as I am at the moment, and, as I have already mentioned, there are some goodies that folks could actually use for their own web sites so over the next couple of days I will be playing around with the options and update them into elsua‘s template. I will keep you all posted when I am done with them.

After writing about all this, one thing that comes out very clear is that whoever thought that Skype was not going to put up a fight against the recent competition that has come about would probably need to think about it twice, because Jyve just managed to shake things up a bit as far as real-time online collaboration is concerned. I am sure we will see further improvements from the different competitors but right now, and for the time being, Jyve’s Plugin seems to be the winner and what has made Skype, once more, the killer app. for remote collaboration with work colleagues, friends, family, etc. you name it.