Veli Hazar is building a directory of businesses in Turkey that use Skype to talk with customers. This fills a useful language/geography niche. People always look for businesses that speak their language and use their favorite communication channels. This behavior drove the workplace adoption of the telegraph, the telephone, the fax machine, and email.

Directories like Konush.net will become obsolete if they only focus on Skype. Large existing directories continue to adapt to customer demand. They add fields for alternate contact types (chat IDs, SIP numbers, fax numbers, web sites, and the like) to their databases, enhancing self-serve and operator assisted searches.

Skype is walking away from helping people find each other.

They dumbed down profile search to simplify the form. In the latest release for Windows, 1.4, Skype cut search of the "About Me" field. I used to be able to search that field for "bondage," "bearings," "bicycling," "bacteriologist" or "blonde." I love being able to look for people based on similar interests, needs, goals, or backgrounds, without preconception or structure. Skype's p2p directory is a great place for experimentation.

With a little evolutionary force, we'll see easy group forming per Reed's law, subject to security and performance limits. In December 2004 lots of people put "tsunami" in their profiles to help find each other. Skype just turned that off.