Skype Shuts Down After 22 Years, Ending an Era of Internet Calling

[ArtOfWarfare]

Huh?

Facetime to a non-Apple user has been a thing for a while...since 2021. The non-Apple user get emailed/messaged a link that opens a Browser window that enables Facetime; it's not a standard. Is that what you are talking about?

Never used it, but my brother did with my parents while he was deployed.

Join a FaceTime call from an Android or Windows device - Apple Support

Got an Android or Windows device? With FaceTime links in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, anyone can join a FaceTime call from their web browser.

support.apple.com

Ok, your message made it sound like people on Windows or Android could join a Facetime call using Teams or Zoom.

But... this is still something a bit interesting that I didn't know about. I might try using it to call family members who use Android instead of using Zoom with them...

 

[wbeasley]

Anyone else had Teams lose contacts after you created and account and exported them to it?

I'm sure they were there at setup but not now...

 

[Adora]

I never used it and just try to remember what I used, if I categorize it as a Messenger...

AOL Messenger and Chat - AIM - ICQ - MSN Messenger - Windows Live Messenger - Yahoo Messenger - maybe only IRC

There is a gap in my mind before the Smartphone messengers and after Yahoo... Could be I only used IRC then.

 

[Green Valkyrie]

VoIP was all the rage in the tech literature as the "next big thing" by the mid-1990s - everyone saw it coming. But having a good user interface and simplifying ease of use ARE the most important thing for extending usage. When I was a grad student at Berkeley, a linguist friend was in Vienna for two years on a Fulbright to work on his PhD. Poor grad students with no money, some computer science friends taught him to go to the computer lab at Universität Wien and they would open a command line link between the two terminals (ours was a via a modem and my Mac Plus, as we all huddled around the 9" screen).

So we were doing real time, free international texting (slowly watching each letter appear, lol) back in 1988. I suspect the hardcore scientists had been doing this for decades. Could I call this an early version of IM, seven years before the www was invented? Maybe, but this was surely not user friendly in ANY universe.

I think you've misunderstood. Yahoo! IM was an instant messaging solution, but it also supported VoIP. It was perfectly usable.

 

[CalfCanuck]

I think you've misunderstood. Yahoo! IM was an instant messaging solution, but it also supported VoIP. It was perfectly usable.

Absolutely - it was a nice, usable implementation at the time. Not trying to get in an argument (in typical MR fashion!), but instead to remind so many here how our internet usage (and apps) have slowly evolved over decades. Just like first implemention of IP protocols began life back in the late 1960s via DARPA...

Skype is a great example of that journey - might be dead now, but it's UI and feature showed hundreds of millions of people alternative ways of communicating, at a fraction of the cost of other solutions at the time. As someone who grew up in numerous countries, just a simple international phone call was the equivalent of $2-3 a minute after adjusting for inflation. Having a free video call across the globe for hours at time seemed pretty amazing in 2003.

 

[Green Valkyrie]

Agree, it was mind-blowing. I discovered it via a colleague who would use it to talk to her mum thousands of miles away for hours on end for free. As you say, at the time overseas phone calls were still in £££s per minute for some destinations.

 

[arobert3434]

Me too, but the app doesn't work anymore - at least here in Germany.
See screenshot:
View attachment 2508483
There is only a hint to using Teams.

It's dead on my phone as well, but still chugging away on my iPad.