Chatting with Skype is like flying first class. Skype lets you organize, customize, save, search, and add links to chats. You can invite chatters who aren't online so that they can be free to join the chat circle later. You can share information, files, contacts, and email links in a Skype chat. You can even have private conversations on the sly while you are chatting with a group. The Skype chat landscape is unique, and this chapter is your guidebook.
Starting a chat is easy. Pick someone you want to chat with (someone who is online), and follow these steps:
Select a Skype contact from your Contacts list.
Click the blue Chat button in the toolbar (see Figure 6-1).
If you don't see the button, open the View menu to verify that a check mark appears next to the View Toolbar option.
After you click the Chat button, you're ready to chat! When your chat opens, it's ready for you to chat with the Skype contact you selected.
To chat with your contact, enter your text in the text box at the bottom of the chat window and press Enter to post the message in the chat room.
A shaded separator bar that contains your name as well as the date and the time of your message appears in the chat window. The separator bars are color-coded so that you can easily spot your messages in the chat, which makes finding your text in the message window easier.
Given the sometimes chaotic, free-for-all nature of chat rooms, you can easily forget your own conversational thread — especially when you're chatting with more than one person at a time. Picking through the messages quickly to find your notes helps you remember the point you are making.
To invite others to join your chat, simply drag and drop a contact from your main window into your message window (see Figure 6-2).
Tip
Buddies in a chat room are free to invite their own friends into the chat by dragging and dropping contacts from their own lists. When a new person is added, an alert appears in each chat participant's window. This alert, visible in Figure 6-2, also identifies the user who invited the new participant as well as the time he or she was added. No secrets here!
Choosing a slew of contacts for a group chat can be useful. Maybe you want to be sneaky. Maybe you are planning a surprise party for your best friend, and you want to use Skype to make sure that all the people you plan to invite are in on the chat from the beginning so that you don't spoil the surprise. In one chat, you can pick a time, place, gift, entertainment, and any other tidbits crucial to a good surprise while avoiding telephone and email tag. Then you can add your best friend to the chat, pretend that everyone is planning a group run in the park, and have the group enter the date in their calendars. Because your soon-to-be-surprised friend was added midway through the chat, he or she can't see the prior conversation. The surprise is intact and your friend none the wiser. Isn't that what best friends are for?
Chatting with a friend is easy. When you have chats with three, four, or more people, the conversations quickly become lively, fun, and fast paced. Sometimes the words are whizzing by more quickly than you can type, and it feels more like a video game than a conversation.
In a chat with three or more people, chatters talk past each other all the time. Questions are asked, and before they are fully answered, more comments, inquiries, and observations pop up in the chat window. You wonder, Who is asking, what am I answering, how do we control this conversation? As with a new class of school kids, it's hard to stop everyone from talking simultaneously.
To help manage the chaos, consider designating a chat abbreviation (a word or emoticon) to indicate the end of each complete thought. As a nod to the past, we use the old CB radio ten codes (see the sidebar "The 'ten' codes").
Tip
If you are about to launch into a long story, don't wait until the end to post what you've written in the message window. If you press Enter after each line, your chat buddies can read your story as you type it, and maybe they'll be less inclined to interrupt. Just be warned that if you use too many breaks, you may confuse your chat buddies.
Anyone who chats across time zones for business communication knows that coordinating international time zones in a group meeting can be tricky. How do you decide when to meet if one member is in New York, another is in India, and another is in Australia? One way is to agree to set your Skype meeting time to one time zone so that there is never any confusion about when to meet if what you are doing is internationally based.
To set your time zone in Skype, choose File
Skype chats are not confined to one message window. A Skype messaging environment is more like a virtual mixer. You can speak to all the members of a group, pair off, have one-to-one conversations, form a new group, swap files with everyone, or share contact lists with some. You can exchange multiple message by opening as many chats as your desktop, and your concentration, can handle.
Whisper chats are one-on-one offshoots of group chats. If you are in a group chat and want to whisper to another participant, you can easily open a new, private chat window. Simply follow these steps:
Select a user's name for your whisper chat.
You can find a chat partner in the Chat Drawer, a window pane that lists all the users. If you don't see other users, click the Show Users icon in your Skype Toolbar (Windows) or select Window
Several icons appear in the window of the person you want to contact.
Click the Chat button.
A new message window opens in addition to the group chat.
Type your message, as shown in Figure 6-4.
Warning
Be sure to separate the windows or make them different sizes. If you type a message in the wrong window, well, we're sure you can fill in the consequences.
Being invited to a chat can be like going on a blind date. Although you may know who invited you, you may not know the other personalities you are asked to socialize with in the chat window. And as with the majority of blind dates (we speak from experience), you may choose not to give out your phone number — or Skype Name, in this case.
If you find a chatter who is objectionable, you can't banish that person from the chat but you can block him or her from your Contacts list so that he or she can no longer have one-on-one chats with you. You can do this immediately in the Contacts window shown during your chat. Simply select the user's name in the Chat Drawer, right-click to bring up the pop-up menu, and click Block This User.
When you block someone, Skype does your dirty work for you and turns away the unwanted skyper.
The Skype chat window serves as a virtual conference. As in a face-to-face meeting, you can place a document in front of every participant of a Skype conference — just to make sure that everyone has all the facts straight.
Skype permits the transfer of files instantly to all or only selected participants. If your chat window is too narrow to fit all the toolbar buttons, you can click the double arrow to reveal hidden toolbar buttons and then click the Send File to All button (see Figure 6-5). You now have access to your directory and can open a file and deliver it. What your chatters see is an alert that lets them know you are sending a file.
Tip
An easy way to transfer files to members of your chat is to drag the file from a folder in Windows Explorer, Windows desktop, or My Computer directly into the chat window. You can even drag an image that's visible from your Web browser into the chat window.
Chat members have to agree to receive your file (see Figure 6-6). If you pick a file to send and realize it is the wrong one, you can cancel the delivery. However, you have to do this quickly, before someone accepts the package.
You can send files only to contacts who have authorized you (they agreed to exchange information upon first contact). So you may be in a chat with five people, but because you have formally authorized only two contacts, you can transmit and receive files only from those two contacts.
Another strategy for sharing information in a chat environment is to paste a Web address or an email address in the message window. These are live links that chatters can click to access Web sites. Everyone can check out the same Web page or email the same organization as the virtual conference takes place. To add to the flexibility of information sharing, you can also copy and paste prepared text into a message window, which is even faster than file sharing if you don't care about the document format.
Tip
Not every file is meant for all eyes. Fortunately, Skype enables you to send a file to one person at a time by choosing the double arrow that appears when you move the mouse into the user's identity box (see Figure 6-7). Clicking the double arrow opens a vertical menu that includes Send File. This menu enables a person-to-person file transfer. Alternatively, you can send a file to a single participant in a chat by dragging a file from your desktop or Windows Explorer directly onto the contact name in the Chat Drawer of your chat window.
A Room with a point of view
You can assign a topic to a chat. Just click the portion of the chat toolbar with "pick a topic" in quotation marks. In addition to a title, you can add emoticons, Web links, and callto:// links (email links) to a topic. To add Web links and email addresses, type them into the topic text box, as shown in the following figure. Because these links are clickable and updateable, chat participants can connect to a Web page containing the chat guidelines, important documents for downloading, or up-to-date information and alerts. To add an emoticon, type its name or copy and paste it from your chat window.
File transfer is one of several actions you can carry out on an individual basis. You can also send a list of contacts you want to share. Simply choose the Share Contacts menu item and then select the contacts you want to send. Of course, your contacts must authorize your chat partner before he or she can see their online activity, but this process is much more efficient than flipping through the old Rolodex for phone numbers.
Another useful feature of a Skype chat is having each participant's profile on hand. There may be members of the group you have never met. Their profile can contain useful information such as where they live, a Web site for their business, and a phone contact. The old problem of trying to remember everyone's name and what he or she does for a living is greatly alleviated by having access to a profile to review while you're on the chat.
Tip
Transferring files and swapping contacts holds enormous potential for efficient workflow. In writing this book, we took advantage of these capabilities, even when we were sitting in the same room. Sometimes the files popped up faster on our screen than we could have handed them to each other across a table. Large files took longer, but after each file was sent and received, we were all on the same page — literally.
Do you ever get a sensitive telephone call at work and find yourself whispering your way through the conversation? Or perhaps you are calling someone on your cell phone and the signal stops. Well, the Skype environment gives you both the opportunity to communicate privately and the choice to type or talk. You can receive a Skype voice call and respond in a chat window. The half-voice, half-chat conversation is a great solution to the open office or portable cubicle work area.
Another reason for a half microphone/half chat conversation is that sometimes you may not have a microphone available. Your sound preferences may not be working properly, so you can't hear the caller's voice (or your caller may be your 86-year-old dad who has no idea what a sound preference is or how he would change it). Having an alternative way to respond to a call provides a simple way to overcome the personal and technical glitches that trip us up on a daily basis.
When you want to close a chat, just click the round red button with the white X inside in your windows heading bar. The chat window closes but the chat is still active. To reopen the chat window, select the name of the contact you were chatting with and click the Chat button. The same chat window with the same text appears. You can pick up where you left off before you closed the chat window.
Just because you left a chat doesn't mean that the chat has disappeared. You can log off of Skype, log back on, and continue a chat that was started previously. To find your former chats, choose Tools
If your chat partner is offline when you resume the chat, you may see a gray icon with an X inside it in the chat participant list. When your chat partner is logged on to Skype, the icon in the participant list appears green. A white check mark or a little clock symbol appears next to the green icon, depending on whether the participant is available or away. You can still send a message, or receive a chat message, whether you indicate through your status icon that you are not to be disturbed, away, or otherwise unavailable. However, Skype — again doing your dirty work for you — explains why you don't answer.
Some chats are worth setting aside in a special place for quick access. Skype has a bookmarking feature for these chats. You can bookmark only chats that have a topic, Web site, emoticon, or email in the topic bar; otherwise, the pushpin-style icon used to mark the chat is not shown.
To set up a bookmark, click the pushpin icon in the chat topic bar. When this icon is "pushed in," the chat appears in a special list that you open by choosing Tools
With Skype, you can choose how you are notified when someone invites you to a chat. You can have a chat window open immediately when the chat starts, or you can have a pop-up alert tell you that someone is waiting for your attention. You can even decide not to have any obvious alert, although you may still like to have the option of knowing that a chat is about to start. Select from the following types of options:
Show alert pop-up: Choose Tool
Show chat window: Choose Tools
If you don't respond to an alert, your Skype window indicates that one new event has occurred (see Figure 6-8). If you click the chat event link, your chat window opens for business. You may hear a sound alert if you have chosen Tools
These options (well, two of them) are a little like call screening. You want to know who is calling, but you want to choose your chats carefully. A highly social person with a long contact list can easily be overwhelmed with willing, needy, or just plain gregarious skypers. It's nice to have some control over your time and privacy.
Chat windows contain a lot of information. The toolbar, writing box, topic bar, user list (filled with images, words, and icons), and emoticon and font choice bars are all visible. You can modify your chatscape to make it easier to see and use, and to organize your information.
You may want to simplify the chatscape so that you can see more of the text window. Click the Hide Users button to eliminate the Contacts list and expand the user text window. You still know who is chatting, and you can bring your Contacts list back at any time by clicking the Show Users button.
Changing the font and increasing the font size may be both decorative and practical. Large fonts are easier to see. Fonts with serifs are more formal as well as easier to read, but they take up more space. You can change the fonts by selecting the Font pop-up menu just above the writing box in your chat window (see Figure 6-9). You can experiment with each font to see which is best for you. Note that changing fonts may replace the shaded separator bars with outlined placeholders (which may or may not be empty), but forfeiting shaded separator bars is a small price to pay for legibility.
Note
Any font changes you make in your chat window are for your eyes only. Other chatters do not see your font selections.
Tip
If you change your font size and style and are totally miserable, don't despair; you can restore the default font. It's Tahoma, 8 points, Western script.
An abbreviated conversation
Chats are so fast and furious that people have created their own chat shorthand. The following dialogue (see the following figure) among three skypers quite literally takes this conversational grammar to an extreme because it is a conversation made up entirely of abbreviations and acronyms.
People frequently mix in chat abbreviations in their conversations. When the same circle of friends converse all the time, there is a tendency to spontaneously evolve their own private shorthand.
To see the conversation in full English, flip the book upside down.
Skype sets the area you use to write text as the smallest box in the chat window. It doesn't have to stay that way, though. You can "grab" the top of the text window and pull it up to have more space to write and see what you have written. Enlarging the space allows you to view paragraphs of text you are editing and are about to send to your fellow skypers, instead of being able to view just a few lines in the text input area.
Tip
As with other Instant Message programs, you can expand the chat window to make it a full screen.
Another way to clean your window is to right-click in the body of the message window and select Clear Messages, which wipes out all the messages in your window. Fortunately, your neatness doesn't clean out anyone else's windows.
Note
If you really want to pare down your messages to their simplest form, change the chat style in the message window to IRC (Internet relay chat). Choose Tools
Chats persist. That is, they don't necessarily disappear when you leave them; they come back when you call them; and they can go on and on. In contrast to other instant messaging systems, Skype chats are like social diaries. They record and remember everything you wrote and everything written to you unless you make an effort to eliminate them by clearing windows or limiting how long they are saved in history. Read on for more about saving and deleting chats.
A Skype chat can last forever. A group of chatters, passionate about a particular topic, can form a chat club, forum, or special interest group. If they bookmark the chat, then each time someone writes a new comment all participants are instantly notified in their chat taskbar, even if all the chatters have closed their chat windows. In fact, when a new message is added, all the bookmarked chats "wake up." To make a chat an ongoing chat, each member of the club must leave his or her Skype software running. The best part is those 3:00 a.m. epiphanies when all the points you wished you'd made in the middle of the chat come to you. Now you have an audience.
All chats are archived. It is a default setting in Skype to save every last bit of chat history. You are not forced to do this, and turning off the chat history is a privacy feature (to the extent that chatting is a private act). But the idea that everything you write, and everything everyone writes to you, can be saved, published to an RSS feed, added to a blog, or just printed, outrivals the most ambitious diary ever written.
Preserving your chats "forever" is easy. Choose Tools
You are just finishing a chat that lasted for hours — a discussion among three international offices about the state of their factory construction. Now you have to take all the information and organize it for a presentation. Who said what, when, in what order, and how do you find it?
In a way, Skype conference chats are efficient in that they save all the information in the exact language each person used. All the statements, re-statements, corrections, corroborations, statistics, Web links, and even emoticons are frozen in time. You can relive the whole experience as many times as you want (which we call an added benefit, for the purposes of this book).
To collect bits and pieces from this massive conversation, right-click in the message window and click Find to open the Find dialog box. You can search by word, time, or Skype Name. Because the chat may go on for pages and pages, the Find utility lets you search up or down (from the end or the beginning of the chat).
To find a specific chat, select the Chat History tab and scroll down to pick a topic or first sentence, date, or contact; then, double-click to reopen the chat.
Transform your chats from words in a chat window to a document or presentation by selecting all the messages, copying them, and then pasting them into a text editor. These documents retain the messages, timestamps, and author of each statement. Some skypers have turned their chats into RSS feeds and podcasts, passed them through text-to-speech programs to make them audible, or even used them as captions for a movie illustrating the chat topic.
Transcripts of chat sessions are on your hard drive. If you switch machines, such as between home and office, the session is associated only with the machine you were using. If you need to have the transcripts, Skype contacts, and in fact all your files centralized in one place, you can run Skype "on a stick" (see Chapter 9 for more information on USB Smart Drives, which are thumb-sized drives that have enough capacity to contain the Skype program and all your personal Skype information).
Message texts can be pasted into email documents, word processors, presentation tools, new Skype chat windows, or Web authoring tools. When the chat is preserved in its new form, it can be emailed, posted on the Web, entered into a blog, or sent in any way digital documents are shared. If you want, you can print them and send them by snail mail.