Here's a whole bunch of ideas for Skype API add-ons. Most of them fall in the category of "I wish this existed". Some might end up being commercial. Most are just geek fun and geek reputation builders.

I've been trying to get php to play with the Skype COM control. The problem is that it needs PHP5 and the COM support for responding to events seems flaky. Maybe Python or Perl would be easier but 'm not good enough on those platforms. I've done the ground work to do some of this stuff in Delphi, but it's web support for linking to web applications is not as good.

Anyway do with it what you will. If you fancy a joint effort drop me a line at julian_bond at voidstar.com

Skype Desktop and Web Development
---------------------------------

- 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 pre-specified 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 functionality 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.


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[ 19-Feb-06 6:51pm ] [ ]