First-order effects

• For Skype, the column is pointed product feedback from a self-described five-year "can't live without" user who lauds screen sharing yet finds the social layer around calls and chats unmanaged — praise and friction arriving in the same package.
• It lands during a sensitive stretch: chief development officer Madhu Yarlagadda left after one month in mid-August 2010, with headlines tying the exit to a planned public offering — a connection that remains unconfirmed.

Second-order effects

• CEO Josh Silverman's stated June 2010 vision of switching devices mid-call without interrupting voice or video would make Skype more ambient across PCs and mobiles, which blurs presence signals and gives etiquette problems like unsolicited pings more surfaces to occur on.
• If workplace reliance keeps deepening along the lines GigaOM flagged in 2007, interruption costs shift from consumers onto employers, making contact defaults and availability settings a management concern rather than a purely personal one.

Third-order effects

• At half-a-billion-plus registered users, the binding constraint on a communications network stops being call quality and becomes social protocol — whether norms about who may reach whom, and when, emerge informally among users or get engineered into default privacy and presence controls.
• For a company reportedly heading toward public markets, engagement quality on a network this size becomes a diligence question, which puts soft issues like etiquette friction on the same ledger as technical ones.