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You might be thinking, what the hell does this have to do with MPK?
To answer that question, I'd have to tell you a story. Several months ago, we tried to hold a meeting to make some decisions about our upcoming recording sessions. So while in Texas, I called Peter, Craig and Matt in Florida...from my cell phone.
Bad idea.
Granted it's not like we didn't accomplish anything that night (that is, outside of wanting to rip each other's ears off). But with the static noise, the confusion, and the looming fear of a dropped signal, I thought there had to be a better way to hold a conference call. And a cheap one at that.
So we tried other ways. The best of what we came up with was gathering in a chat room and typing away. Which is mainly how we do things right now. Still I think, not good enough.
So I started playing with other programs that lets you talk to multiple people via your computer (ie. MSN and Yahoo messenger), and it's still choppy, still failing to abstract the fact that the person I was talking to was miles away.
Not with skype.
I ABSOLUTELY LOVE this thing and I've only have been testing it for a couple of days. It's as if the person you're talking to is right there in your living room (or bedroom, dining room, torture room, whichever you prefer), and you can hear EVERYTHING. From someone talking across the room to someone flushing the toilet, you hear it and it's clear. Shockingly clear.
And the download, the service, the minutes -- it's all freakin' FREE.
Now I got to thinking, this is too good to be true. So I went to their website and found out that this was made by the same people who made KaZaA.
Spyware, adware and malware immediately hijacks the mind.
So I adroitly started searching and even though it plainly says in their website that skype contains no spyware, people seem to want to believe otherwise. (The gist of it involves the vagueness of the End User License Agreement.) However, I found some articles that were pretty convincing, one interviewing Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom himself, noting how it's counterproductive to bundle skype with spyware.
Of course, being innately paranoid, I'm not convinced. So I conducted an ad hoc spyware search on my machine. So far, 0 spywares found. So (for now) I'm pretty happy with it, and will continue to use it, hopefully, for talking with MPK.
But I'm watching you, skype, very very closely.
