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I have an old friend on Skype that I sometimes call or send messages to. She always responds back quickly. So today, I decided to call her since Skype was not working. She did not answer, and I left her a message. She texted me back after about an hour, saying her Skype was not working and thus she could not talk to me. We always talk face to face when we meet, so on initial observations it may not be easy for many to realize why one cannot communicate easily on channels other than in person or through Skype, even though through Skype one usually either talks or simply types. I asked my friend if I could talk mention her situation on my site, and she laughed and told me “sure.” In this case, Skype facilitates and even allows the existence of many messages, specially for my friend.

An example of Skype crippling business communication

Earlier today, around 5 am, I get an international call from a distant friend that I also did business with long time ago. I know him for a few years, and thus once a year or so we like to keep in touch. He told me that his company support systems were down, as they depended solely on Skype and they needed any advice on how to communicate with about 50 of their big and only clients. Those clients were used to opening up Skype from anywhere and being able to reach the customer support for this company at anytime and to be connected live to an actual support person with a webcam, guaranteed. My friend knows a little bit about my background and enough about my skills, so he thought I could somehow come up with a solution that could fix their Skype-based customer support system for them.

Now that Skype was logging out not only my friend’s company but also customers repeatedly, my friend’s company could not simply say to customers “Hey, Skype is down, not our fault“, since the customers could say “Well, why did you choose Skype as your support system over which you have no control over in situations like these? We need support now. Not later, but right now, at this very instant.” The customers would be completely right in this case. So I asked my distant friend about how their support systems depended on Skype, and I told him that if I feel that the explanation will not help me come up with a problem, I will cut him off. He was really desperate for an immediate, so there was no time to lose with formalities or listening to everything.

He started explaining how their customer support systems worked, and after less than 3 minutes of him explaining things, I was really happy to know more about how Skype can actually help complex systems, but at the same time I realized knowing how Skype worked will not help me find the solution. I had to focus on alternatives immediately, that could do an even better job than Skype for the time being. I cut him off, rather abruptly, and told him I had a few solutions for him, and apologized for cutting him off. The way he told me with enthusiasm and delight that he did not mind being cut off showed me that things were really bad for him because of Skype not working. I told him of a few solutions and alternatives, and told him why one of the alternatives I think would work for him immediately, and how. After the entire thing was finished, I asked him if I could write about it on my personal site, since this is a topic that can affect all of us forever [more of it below]. He told me to wait a bit until later, and that he would call me again, at which time I could go ahead with writing about it while I also avoided mentioning any specifics, names or my exact solution [since he plans to use it from now on as the primary backup], so here is what I have on the entire topic.

Skype is a tool to help your message. Skype is not the message.

Skype is there to help you communicate in more ways. Let us read that one more time please. Skype is there to help you communicate in more ways. Skype is not the message; it is the medium. Let me repeat that again in a little bit more enhanced manner please. Skype is not the message; it is a technological tool. In order to communicate, you should at least have the message you want to convey, and you should what you want to convey through the message. If you know the message and know that you want to communicate something through the message, you can easily switch from one medium to another and from one tool to another in order to come up with alternatives to things like Skype.

Skype was known, until today, for almost never having any connection problems. The Skype platform itself is considered very robust and reliable by many, and thus even though it is a severe problem for many that is still happening at the time of this writing, this recent downtime in Skype communications will probably result in many companies and many people seeking out only alternative backups for the future, instead of seeking out complete replacements to be installed right away. Because of such issues, you should always use technology to only help you in communication, instead of define communication. Technology should rely on your message. Your message should not rely on technology. Technology should revolve around your message. Your message should not revolve around technology.

Control the message. Control the tool. Do not let the tool control you or the message.

If you know how to communicate with people, you will not depend on Skype to communicate with them. You will realize how to communicate and talk normally on mediums other than Skype when needed, so that you do not waste other people’s time and so that you do not bring conversations to a standstill, causing others to be uncomfortable and inconvenienced simply because you depend on Skype to feel comfortable when it comes to communication and simply because Skype is not working. For example, if you can communicate perfectly via Skype but do not know how to communicate via e-mail or phone or any other medium even when you are forced to, that means you have focused more on the medium and the tool, like Skype, instead of the message and the concept of communicating that message itself.

If you are used to asking people how their day was via Skype, you should know how to ask the same question via e-mail or over the phone. If you are used to sending information to people via Skype, you should know how to send the information via e-mail or via actual postal mail to people. If you are used to finding out more about people through Skype, you should know how to do the same via other mediums and tools like e-mail or other instant messengers. If you are used to providing help to others via Skype, you should know what the actual help consists of, and offer that help via other mediums and channels, including doing it in person.

Revolve the medium and technology around your message.

Revolve the medium around your message. Revolve technology around your message. Majority of the bloggers and majority of the people in the offline world revolve their message around other things so much, that if anything other than the message changes, the actual message gets affected and changes too. It is like 99% of all PowerPoint presentations at majority of the conferences, where the message revolves around PowerPoint. It is simply nonsense, and it is simply hilarious.

More and more people know how to communicate only through certain tools; they do not know how to communicate a message.

Is it a bad thing for more and more people to know how to communicate only through certain tools and to not know how to communicate a message? For me it is very bad, as it is more important for me to focus on the message and communicating that message, instead of focusing only or more on the communication tool provided. Otherwise, the message revolves around the tool, and thus the message gets limited and changes. As I said above, control the tools, instead of letting the tools control you or the message.

A great example of this? You do not send items that need shipping depending on how they will be shipped. You send whatever item you have that needs shipping. No matter what the item is, you ship it in a rugged piece of cover, whether it is an envelope or a box, so that shipping companies like UPS, DHL, Fed-Ex or USPS can deliver them via a truck, a train, a plane, in person or even on a boat. That is how much importance you should give to the message when it comes to realizing how much focus, compared to the message, you should put on the medium and the tool. The medium and the tool need a lot of focus, but that focus should be less than the original focus that you put on your message and the way you want the message presented or communicated.

What happened to my personal friend and my business friend?

As for my personal friend, Stephanie, if you are reading this, feel free to call me anytime, as doing a voice chat over Skype once a month can be the same as having a conversation over the phone.

As for my distant friend with the business issue, he called me again about an hours ago and told me that he is happy with the solution I offered and that it is helping keep all the customers around, even though Skype is still having issues. He said my alternate solution has literally saved him thousands of dollars per each customer, without considering the costs that the company might have experienced had any customer left the company in the last 12 hours or so. I told him “You better be happy, since it works and I didn’t charge you for it. ” Well, he is so happy, he offered to pay for my entire trip and accommodation if I ever decide to visit him and his company to see if I would want to work there in the future.

Those are some points of one of my small thoughts of the second. Thank you for reading about what happened in an hour or less of my life today. I really appreciate it.

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After the trend of leaving long messages came the practise of calling people repeatedly, leaving multiple messages in a day. It was as if one was making sure that the messages left were not disappearing by themselves. Then came cell phones: people started leaving short messages in the beginning, treating cell phones with respect. Then suddenly, at a much faster rate than home phones, people started leaving long messages on cell phones, even though people knew that checking voice messages on cell phones cost money most of the time. As the idea of leaving cell phone messages started becoming the norm, text messages came along to let people send text messages to each other. Text messages became the new norm, with some people sending more text messages every day than the number of people they had in their address book.

Now, it seems that many people are turning to the likes of Skype and Yahoo Messenger Voice Mail, among other online messengers, to leave messages. Many people are treating such protocols as being the accepted norm. Someone recently emailed me saying “I left a voice message on your Yahoo messenger last week and you never called back“, which is interesting. I’ve not used Yahoo Messenger for voice messages for a long time, and I have not yet considered it an official platform to relay important messages. Similarly, people tell me “Oh, didn’t you get my message with the new meeting time? I left it on your AIM this morning.” I leave my computer on most of the time, even when I leave the house. Thus, many messages I read for the first time are already around 24 hours old. For some reason many people cannot leave their homes without a cell phone, yet they also do not use it to make important phone calls.

Long time ago, people used to be wary of embracing anything new. Nowadays, many people embrace any new piece of technology as if their life depends on it. While I love the idea of trying something new in nontraditional ways, I’m wary of people who try new things without knowing how to use those things. Many people never try to learn how to use something efficiently either. Instant messaging is great, though if alternate channels like cell phones are available, instant messaging is still not the platform to use if one wishes to convey something extremely important, like changing a meeting time at the last minute, letting an employee go in your company, or even like breaking up with someone, though one day such things will be commonly practised online. Any new technology should be used to gain efficiency for everyone involved in the beginning, not just the user. If one uses a piece of technology to their own benefit, and that results in inconvenience for others around them, the only end result will be short term convenience for the user and long term alienation from other people. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. That is what defines common sense among many people, and that is what many people forget: common sense applies to everything, including the use of technology.

What is your opinion on this? What do you think about the different methods and channels described above? Do you use any channel of communication extensively and consider it the norm? Do you have any opinion on which channel could be improved or used more, or which ones are being misused? If so, please let me know.

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1. Your webcam turns on automatically whenever your computer turns on. You have setup your computer and your instant messaging programs to automatically turn on the webcam in any chat or voice conversation, whether you’re sleeping, around the computer or away from home.
2. You try to turn off the lights in the shower, to make sure no one watches you. Yes, you can dry yourself with ease knowing that you aren’t being watched by someone on Skype, and when you realize you don’t have a webcam in the bathroom, you don’t laugh at the whole situation; you get mad. “Why don’t I have a webcam in the shower?“, you ask yourself.
3. Your webcam is powerful enough to move along with your body. If you walk in your room, your webcam follows you. If you bend down to scratch your body, your webcam captures all the action.
4. You don’t like to approve online friends who don’t have a webcam. If an online buddy does not have a webcam, you block them from your Yahoo buddy list. If a new person who wants to add you as their friend doesn’t have a webcam, you block them.
5. You dress up everyday to look good on the webcam. You take your clothes to the laundry so that you can look good on the webcam. When you go out to a shopping center or a mall, you dress in clothes that usually result in people staying at least 5 feet away from you, in a circle. That makes you feel powerful, and you don’t know why.
6. If you need some time alone from everyone, you turn the webcam away towards the wall. Sometimes you sit in a corner where the webcam’s view is blocked by some object. You never unplug the webcam during this process, by the way.
7. Your webcam has a name. You call your webcam “HAL” or “SAL“, and the next generation of webcams, in your view, should be able to talk.
8. The first thing you like to see in the morning is your webcam. People dream of waking up next to a beautiful person in the morning. You dream of waking up to a better webcam that is watching you in the morning.
9. Your webcam is your counselor. When you’re depressed or upset, you talk to the webcam as if you were talking to a qualified psychiatrist. Sometimes when you’re really upset, you also say to your webcam “Oh come on, don’t say that!“, knowing that the webcam is actually responding to you.
10. Your webcam is a baby of yours. If someone tries to fight with you or insult you in your computer room, you tell that person “Not here“, pointing to the webcam with your eyes. You don’t want your webcam to be exposed to indecent words.
11. Your webcam is your baby. If you ever sleep with someone in the computer room, you don’t remember that night as sleeping with Betsy, but as sleeping with Betsy and your webcam.
12. You don’t like anyone to talk about your webcam in a bad way. If anyone ever tells you that “your webcam sucks” or that your webcam is old, you get offended and block that person on your MSN Messenger account.
13. If anyone ever comes to your computer room and touches your webcam, you get surprised and ask that person “WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!!“ There is no word for a pedophile drooling after webcams, so you call that person a “webdophile” before kicking them out of the house. Since there is no law yet to protect webcams against a webdophile, you tell your webcam that same night “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.” You then curse all the webdophiles and cry yourself to sleep.
14. Breaking up with a webcam is always hard for you. If you find a better webcam than the one you already have, you sit down and look at the old webcam with teary eyes before unplugging it from your computer.

Those are the top signs that will show you the strength of your love for your webcam. What about you? How much do you like your webcam? Do you even have a webcam? Do you consider it a piece of technology or a piece of your heart?

As for me, I’ll get back to my webcam conference with someone Skype right now. Thank you for reading.

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