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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

The one key element of a Skype Killer, which isn't present in WebRTC, is a prescribed infrastructure to support these communications. Skype is made up of users who actually are, usually, unaware that they are also routing calls for other users. Even more precarious (and absent from WebRTC) are the skype SuperNodes, which no one is going to redo for WebRTC.

The things which we love about skype, most notably the directory and ease of routing, are currently missing from WebRTC. Someone might come along and make them, but WebRTC is not inherently different from Skype's infrastructure, it's just new. Someone still has to build the supporting services to turn this into a Skype Killer.

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The user supernodes were mostly retired after microsoft bought Skype. See: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...

Retired and centralized are different terms. I think you'll find the supernodes are alive and well (just centralized in Redmond). The obvious implication is that it is very hard to monitor a decentralized infrastructure but trivial if the servers are local.

If that was your point, I apologize for being redundant.

It would seem to greatly lower the cost of building a Skype-killer, though, and that's a pretty big deal.

Sort of. Now you don't need to build client software, but that was never the real prowess or power of Skype, it was always the infrastructure.

Think of it this way. Skype has 2 things that WebRTC doesn't: Signaling and a Directory. Without those two components, you just have a phone without a phone number :/.

Lower barrier, yes. Easy? No, there are still significant costs.

Seems like Facebook is pretty close to solving signalling and a directory - in effect it already has them for their messaging service. If you enable chat on Facebook then people can already find you for chat and know if you're [reporting that you're] available.

FB is already in bed with Skype though I think so not sure how that would pan out in practice.

There's a difference between phone numbers and the Facebook directory. One is a user-owned identity which can migrate between carriers, the other a walled garden. With a phone number, I have an identity which can be linked to many services including Facebook. With a Facebook login, I am beholden to Facebook as my directory.

I'm not saying that this is relevant, because for the majority of users it isn't. I'm saying this for the hackers who just watched Facebook deny Voxer. If Facebook can capriciously decide who I can and can't talk to, that's not really what I would call an identity. What Facebook gives you is a slice of an identity, the slice it thinks you ought to have.

For many that is enough; for others it is an insult.

Google twelephone

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