You may have noticed we've got Skype indicators on Ecademy today. If you're in my contact list, then your indicator will be live while I'm online.

The way this works is that I have a desktop tray program running that watches my copy of Skype. Whenever it sees a presence change, it makes a webservice call to the Ecademy web server. You can see the web service here. The server side then creates a pair of images in /skype/ called your_skype_name.gif and your_skype_name_g.gif These are the images that appear on your profile and against your name in lists. The web service checks to see if the Skype_profile_name is a person that is an Ecademy member. So this is not a general service but only for Ecademy members.

The problem here is that when your skype contacts list gets very big (eg >500) presence updates get slower and slower. So I can't really run a single Ecademy Skype Presence server and have everyone connect to it. People who've tried to do this (Like Jyve) discovered that updates were taking 15 minutes to several hours to propagate.

So what I'm looking for is:-
- A few more people prepared to run the desktop app. The benefit to you is that your presence on Ecademy will change immediately. The side effect is that all the Ecademy members in your contact list will also be activated.
- A programmer prepared to take on the code for the desktop app. It's currently written in Delphi but could easily be reverse engineered into C#, C++ or others. It's fairly clean but it doesn't yet cope well with putting the machine into sleep mode or closing down and restarting.

BTW. My Skype contact name is julian.bond
BTW2. It's important that the skype name in your profile is the same as your actual Skype name. And it is case sensitive and typically all lower case. [from: JB Ecademy]


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[ 11-May-05 11:09am ]