It's not news that Skype reports outages and problems. Those reports, scattered through its many blogs and forums, were hard to find. Bill Campbell wrote earlier about Skype's new Heartbeat page. Bringing announcements and status together on one page is excellent for users and for Skype's partners. Good job!

It isn't nearly enough, though. Here's what else I'd like to see:

Alerts of outages and problems. Push your news to people who ask for it. Let us subscribe via via email, RSS and SMS.

Status the clients. You're reporting on the infrastructure, but the software itself should get the same treatment. Perhaps you can share measures of health like:

• customer trouble tickets per capita over the last 14 days (trending up or down)
  
• number of known severe bugs in the latest release
  
• pie chart showing estimated number of active users for all versions and platforms
• days since last release and the official latest release number for each platform
• upgrade importance rating for each release - nice to have, get it if you have problems, drop everything and upgrade now
  

User Activity Trending. While you're at it, share what living statistics you have for client use. How many people are using Skype in Ghana? Are online in Ghana? What languages is the Skype cloud speaking now? From where are people downloading the most? Which sites are referring the most users in the last 72 hours? How many Skypers are coming online in the next two hours and from where? How many voice mails are being left? How long are they? In what languages? How is this changing over time? You have a wealth of raw data; please use it to provide insight into the Skypsphere.

External Threat Warnings. Skype runs on an Internet that is sometimes broken, congested, intermittent, lossy, obstructed, slow or otherwise imperfect. Report the "Internet weather" by region. My favorite presentation is the Internet Traffic Report.

Hostile Territory Warnings. Many countries issue warnings before you travel to an epidemic or a war zone. Skype should list governments, ISPs and telcos blocking Skype.com or downgrading Skype traffic. Give Skypers a single place to look and clarity about their situation. The reported institutions might be offered the opportunity to comment and share their official positions, communicating with Skypers they serve, and a venue for hearing from their customers.

Internal Stress Factors. The Skype cloud (how all of us find each other) depends on having enough supernodes (Skype clients outside a firewall that help the cloud do its job) in the right place at the right time on systems powerful enough to do a supernode's job. It shouldn't be hard to map places where supernode service is in short supply at this hour, resulting in slower propagation of IM, longer connect times, etc. It might correct user expectations at bad times. Don't just report a system is healthy or dead; show the causal factors, history and your near term predictions so members of the Skype ecosystem can pitch in to improve things. For example, if the country of Skypestan was experiencing a shortage, a local company using Skype might choose to float twenty instances of Skype outside their firewall.

Nitpicks:

Nit 1. I'd love a legend explaining the various hearts, their messages. For example, what does "working normally" mean for Peer-to-peer network core? What is the p2p network core?

Nit 2. Provide links near the top of the page where people can take action: the appropriate Skype forum to discuss a situation, email or skype numbers for reporting new issues, the bugbase, help ticket form, etc.

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