Skype goes all Snapchat with Highlights, its own riff on Stories

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

In a bid to make Skype more social, Microsoft is launching a whole new generation of Skype clients. The big new feature? “Highlights,” a way of publishing photos and videos so that your contacts can keep up with what’s going on in your life. Highlights are more or less a replica of the Snapchat Story, a way of sharing time-limited pictures and videos to your contacts. It changes the client from being a strictly conversational application (with both one-to-one and group chats) into something that also offers a broadcast style.

While Microsoft’s Skype messaging system is still regularly used by hundreds of millions of people, it’s not the mindshare winner it once was. A range of mobile-oriented upstarts—including Kik, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger—have proliferated in the smartphone era. Skype initially struggled in this new world, with its peer-to-peer architecture making it a poor fit for a world where connectivity can be intermittent and conversations are expected to migrate between devices.

Over a number of years, Microsoft has moved Skype to a more conventional client-server architecture, using the opportunity to add useful features such as vastly improved file sharing and offline messaging. With this ground work finally done, the company has been developing a new client, internally named Skype for Life, to try to reconnect with this audience.

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Ars Technica

Post Author: martin

Martin is an enthusiastic programmer, a webdeveloper and a young entrepreneur. He is intereted into computers for a long time. In the age of 10 he has programmed his first website and since then he has been working on web technologies until now. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of BriefNews.eu and PCHealthBoost.info Online Magazines. His colleagues appreciate him as a passionate workhorse, a fan of new technologies, an eternal optimist and a dreamer, but especially the soul of the team for whom he can do anything in the world.

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