I've used Skype for a while now. I don't often use it to call phones, but it's there as a way to talk to certain people. It's been generally reliable with very little down time, but yesterday something went wrong. The connection keeps dropping and I never see all my contacts. We use it at work to keep in touch with our various offices, but that has not been viable during this issue.

They have been good enough to keep us up to date with progress. I'm intruiged by the remark: 'This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software.' I wonder what suddenly went wrong. They use P2P technology, so you would expect it to be fairly robust, but there must be some central control.

Of course I would prefer to use more open technologies, but you sometimes have to go with the crowd. I'm still on Jabber, via the Google Talk network, but am not using their software, so I can't do the voice chat. I would like to see more of my contacts using Jabber, but it seems they are mostly committed to Skype and MSN.