Ideas for Techies to extend Skype

A while ago I was interacting with Julian Bond, CTO of Ecademy.com, and he emailed me a list of ideas to throw open to Software developers, who would like to build their reputation as outstanding developers by demonstrating their code rather than just a CV. Any one up for a challenge ? Julian is a highly respected developer and thinker, having single handedly developed the architecture and code of the Ecademy platform. He emailed a list of ideas for the Indian software development community to extend the now ubiquitious Skype. Skype now has over 5.5 million users and growing fast with a current campaign running to encourage users to share skype and reach out to 100 million users.

Below are some ideas presented by Julian.

Here's a whole bunch of ideas all related to extending Skype. They almost all fall under the heading of "I wish this existed". I've done some work on trying to create some of this but I'm hitting brick walls. For instance, the bot would most easily be built using php, perl or python. I haven't been able to persuade php to accept Skype COM events which rules it out. I have managed to do the ground work using Delphi, but there's a shortage of web libraries to do all the rest of it. I can catch messages and respond to them but the rest of it is then hard. Anyway. As I said when we met, only some of this stuff is likely to have commercial possibilities. Most of it is just hobbyist so the only payback is reputation.

Skype Desktop and Web Development
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- A Bot architecture that can be extended to provide utility functions to Skype group chat participants. This would either be running on a participants machine or would run on a dummy Skype account running on a dedicated machine. Invite the account into the chat to get the facilities.

- Group chat to Web archiving. Every message is echoed to a web page
store.

- Group Chat to Blog posting. ?blog Text. Would post Text to a
prespecified group blog.

- Group Chat to del.icio.us posting. ?delicious URL Tags [Text] would
post a bookmark for URL to del.icio.us

- Auto TinyURL to URLs mentioned in chat. Any URLs mentioned in the
chat over a minimum length would be converted into a tinyurl

- Karma server. Any word of the form myWord++ or myWord-- would
increment or decrement a karma store for that word. ?karma myWord
would retrieve the current value

- Get top three results for searches in
- Google
- Amazon
- Technorati
- del.icio.us
eg ?google ecademy returns the top 3 results for ecademy

- Description server. A bunch of commands to define a text description
of XXX eg ?def XXX is really stupid. ?XXX would return "XXX is really
stupid"

- Heralding. When somebody joins a chat, grab a description from the
description server or from their profile and sends "SkypeName is blah, blah, blah"

- Copy Jibot on IRC Here's Jibot's help.
Dictionary and user info: ?learn concept is definition || ?whois concept || ?whatis concept ||?forget concept is definition || ?forgetme
Technorati: ?info blog.com || ?last blog.com || ?cosmos blog.com
|| ?blogrep keywords
Amazon: ?amazon words || ?asin ASIN || ?isbn ISBN
Google: ?google words
Karma: nick++ || nick-- || ?karma nick || ?karma

- An app that let you control remote Apps such as a Shoutcast (internet
radio) server. Send a chat message to the app and it would return status or make a status change of the attached app.

- An Add-on that paused and restarted *all* music players such as iTunes instead of just winamp on incoming and outgoing voice calls.

- An Add-on to get what you're currently listening to in all major music players and use it to update your mood.

- An Add-on to switch Skype to mono, single channel so that the voice call was more like a phone in one ear when wearing stereo headphones.

- A Firefox sidebar that replicated the Skype UI.

- An Add on that implemented the missing NetMeeting funcionality piggybacked on Skype's comms. eg whiteboard, desktop sharing.

- A file sharing app that lets you browse shared directories on the target machine and then download a file or folder. Think Soulseek meets Skype encrypted file transfers.

- An app that can stitch together two or more group chats to get round the 50 participant limit.

- Automatic GPS and/or IP-Geo translation+Skype Presence to Google Map See http://www.gatagata.jp/SKSweets/ja/map_ww.html

- Stalk. An App to watch a specific person and to then alert you when they came online.

- An App and web site to enable a professional to charge by the minute for time spent providing their service via Skype, Skype-In and Skype-Out

- A distributed call centre where call centre operators worked at home via Skype, Skype-in and Skype-out.

Other members feel free to add more such challenges for developers.

Regards
Ajay