The beginning of the year began very promising concerning the concurrent Skype users online. In a speed record of 42 days we passed from 11 million to 12 million people online at peak time [18 January 2008 - 7 February 2008].

As my regular readers know, there are some fluctuations, resulting in less people online at:

• “GMT”-night
• Weekends
• National holidays of bigger Skype countries (USA, Brasil, UK, …)
• Christmas and New Year Period
• Northern Hemisphere Summer Period

The graph below represents my samples of concurrent people online since the early beginning of Skype, and it seems we are entering in summer recession.

• The points marked 1, 2, 3 and 5 are the Northern Hemisphere summer periods of 2005 till 2008.

• The vertical line “4” represents the huge outage of August last year.

The next “million milestone” will most probably not be reached before September. This is deceptive. Indeed, the promising “start of the year” mentioned above seems to have been a “one shot”.

All the new “features” added by Skype in the last months, including the caller ID number recognition launched some weeks ago were not spectacular enough to attract bunches of new users. This doesn't mean those features were not nice. I would even say the Skype client has improved in the last months: less bugs, more stability, better quality.

Skype continues to grow; of this I am quite sure. But not at the same speed as their best year, 2006, where almost 4 million “peak concurrent users” online were added! Let’s us meet in September again to witness the 13 million milestone.

Jean Mercier, the Skype Numerologist, is on his own family holiday in Brazil.