“Twype allows you to grab tweets from *any* Twitter account (there’s no
authentication) and lets you publish that stream as Skype mood
messages. Twype only works from Skype for Windows PCs.”

A new Skype add-on named Twype was just released by its developer Julian Bond. I’m very excited about it because it offers tremendous opportunities and because it fulfills a desire I’ve felt for years ever since I started using Skype. Let me explain what Twype does with a mix of screenshots and text:

Nothing special so far. To have this tweet and all my subsequent ones appear on my Skype mood message, I installed Twype using the direct download URL. Note that Twype will only run from Windows PCs and that you’ll need to put it in your start-up folder to make it run every time you use Skype.

After installing Twype, Skype will prompt you to confirm that you approve the Twype add-on:

After you approve Skype’s request, you’ll see this screen:

Type in your Twitter user ID and press “Get Tweet Now”. With my own ID I get this:

In this screenshot you can clearly see that Twype also appends the time stamp of the most recent tweet to your mood message. Now, feel free to minimize this panel, because during this Skype session, Twype will grab your tweets every five minutes.

You can find Julian’s original announcement from today on his blog Voidstar in the post Announcing Twype.exe.

Posting your life stream on Skype
If you do some quick thinking about the other Twitter tools that are already available, then Twype finally lets you post your life stream to your Skype mood message. What you’re doing, where your attention goes, where you are travelling, can now all be posted to your Skype mood message. The steps you need to take are:

1. Create a life stream feed (tons of tools for that, Ziki comes to my mind first)
2. Create a new Twitter account
3. Authenticate with the credentials of your new Twitter account on Twitterfeed
4. Provide Twype with your Twitter account name

Robert Sanzalone from the pacificIT Skype chat room created a digg for Julian’s post, which I kindly welcome you to support:

Auto-discovery still loudly buzzing in my head, I checked if Skype RSS Robot could also detect any of my feeds by just providing it the url to CleverClogs:

I’ll post an update here to see if Skype RSS Robot indeed is able to notify me of the CleverClogs blog being updated with a blog post about ‘Skype RSS Robot’ (don’t you love those Escherian deadlocks). (Update 2006-10-19: the bot finally shows my feed items)

The Skype RSS Robot page also offers RSS publishers the option to generate a subscription chicklet, but I wasn’t able to get it to work with my FeedBurner feed. (Update 2006-10-18: the chicklet finally works for me: )

From the website design Skype RSS Robot seems very early stage ("BOLG" instead of "BLOG", and even that link leads nowhere), but the main functionality definitely is in place. (Update 2006-10-18: and another improvement here: there is now a Robot’s Blog, which even mentions that you can use the Skype bot to validate your feeds, Just dump them in the Skype chat window and if the bot reports that your subscription was successful, then the validation succeeded also)

UPDATE: 2006-10-17 Open-source evangelist Chris ‘Joe Factory’ Messina of Citizen Agency found my blog post and discovered which commands are supported by Skype RSS Robot. Most important feature that I had been wondering about is that you can schedule how often the robot delivers news items. Read Chris’ post on his blog "FactoryCity": Luobotou RSS Robot — feeds for Skype.

"… so basically you can now transmit video images from your webcam while you’re having a voice call with multiple people, while you’re text chatting with somebody and even when you’re not engaged in any Skype activity altogether. Read that again."

My Skype buddy list is a nice example of unscientific, experiential evidence that the Skype installed userbase is growing exponentially. Not only did several of my existing MSN, AIM and Yahoo! buddies recently sign up for a Skype account, but I’m also rediscovering dear old friends and adding new connections daily. Some of these new connections originate from my recent decision to become a member of the social business networks Ecademy, LinkedIn and OpenBC, other new connections are with software vendors and geeks—of course it’s not surprising these people embrace Skype’s sheer unbeatable offering. Skype has become even more popular thanks to over a hundred priceless plugins of diverse origin and functionality scope. Browse the Skype Extras Gallery to see which plugins have the most page views.

A new submission to the Skype gallery literally caught my eye a few days ago and it hasn’t let go of it since then: AvaCon for Skype.

Take a peek preview at their site:

The executive summary on AvaCon for Skype is this: AvaCon for Skype sends a live stream of frequent snapshots from your webcam and displays this stream in the so-called avatar frame—the picture frame that is part of your Skype profile. So basically you can now transmit video images from your webcam while you’re having a voice call with multiple people, while you’re chatting with somebody and even when you’re not engaged in any Skype activity altogether. Read that again.

Imagine what you can do with AvaCon for Skype right now:

• set up a two-way or multi-party video+audio conference call in Skype
• broadcast your live picture stream while having a Skype text chat conversation (again with multiple people if you want)
• let any of your buddies keep an eye on your house, your nanny, your cat’s food supply or… you!

Speaking from my own experience, I noticed my text chat conversations became a lot livelier since I installed AvaCon for Skype. People could tell whether or not I was in a good mood, my facial expressions and my hand movements were perfectly in synch with my text messages and over all most people were very surprised and delighted to see me while chatting. I received some envious inquiries too, from folks who were wondering how I had tweaked Skype to make it transmit video in this way. Others didn’t even realize that something had changed about my setup. Lots of chuckles on both ends of course. So, if you’d decide to install AvaCon for Skype, here’s how you configure it:

The AvaCon for Skype Options dialog box is quite straightforward with just two major sections: Video and Avatar. Most settings are clearly explained in the info sections to the right of each option.

The Active Calls Only option immediately terminates the live
picture stream after the active voice call is finished.

Video options: of course you can disable video completely—note that double clicking on the system tray icon has the same toggle-switch-type effect. You can fine-tune your webcam settings as with most video conferencing.systems. By default AvaCon for Skype writes the captured images to your hard drive. You can also use a RAM drive—a section of your computer memory that acts like it’s a hard drive, but then without the read/write delays. The registered version of AvaCon for Skype  ($9.95) comes with a free RAM disk driver. Frame rates are supported from one refresh per 60 seconds up to one refresh per second (that’s the fastest).

Avatar options: you can use AvaCon for Skype to quickly take a snapshot picture of yourself or of anything else and use that as your default picture when the plugin is disabled.

Several concerns were raised about Avacon for Skype’s potentially weak privacy scheme
toward the broadcaster (you don’t want to accidentally forget to switch off your webcam when your lover enters your office, do you?). Some people may be concerned about bandwidth issues for the receiving
party as well. I decided it was time for a call to San Diego. So, last night I had an inspiring talk with the inventor of AvaCon for Skype: George Miles of Inventeering. It’s impossible (and probably utterly boring) to list every single topic that we discussed, but the most interesting one was "What’s in the pipeline for near-future releases of AvaCon?"

Here’s a list of additional features that you can expect short-term:

• as a broadcaster, decide to which contacts you send your live picture stream (by group, by their online status, in voice calls or text chat sessions or both)
• as a broadcaster, decide from which of your own online status modes your live picture stream is broadcast
• as a broadcaster, limit your live picture stream to active chats only
• as a receiver, decide from whom you’d like to receive their live picture stream
• quick-mute the live picture stream through a configurable global keyboard shortcut

My recommendation: if you’re a Skype user and you own a webcam, I strongly suggest that you give AvaCon for Skype a whirl. The image quality is excellent and with Skype’s own video conferencing being a far ship on the horizon, AvaCon for Skype is a cheap and attractive solution that’s very easy to install.

Platform compatibility: AvaCon for Skype currently runs on desktop PCs running Windows only. Contact Inventeering, Inc. if you or someone you know would have the skills and the time to produce a Mac OSX or Linux version.

Direct download link: try AvaCon for Skype (15-days)

Pricing: $9.95 (order page)

AvaCon for Skype Live News Radar