Presentation on social networking tools

I followed up my full day workshop in Buffalo, NY yesterday with a one-hour presentation today on social networking tools in Tallahassee, FL. The event was co-sponsored by the Florida-Caribbean Chapter of SLA and the North Florida Library Association. It was interesting to see what tools people were already using and what they had questions on.

For example, one person asked about Skype and whether it used the networks of its users to route phone calls. Good question. Skype says:

Non-firewalled clients and clients on publicly routable IP addresses are able to help NAT’ed nodes to communicate by routing calls. This allows two clients who otherwise would not be able to communicate to speak with each other. Because the calls are encrypted end-to-end, proxies limit the security or privacy risk.

Likewise, only proxies with available spare resources are chosen so that the performance for these users is not affected.

That means that not all networks are used. The questioner said that one university found its networking being impacted by Skype and so had disabled it. I, however, don't see my network being impact at all by Skype. Whether or not your network is impacted will depend on whether it is non-firewalled and has publicly routable IP addresses.

However, Skype -- when its running on your PC -- does use resources. According to Skype:

On average Skype uses 0-0.5 kilobytes/sec while idle. This is used mainly for contact presence updates. The exact bandwidth depends on many factors.

That's not a lot, but it may mean that you don't want to be running Skype all the time, if you're concerned about the resources your using. They also say:

Skype automatically selects the best codec depending on the connection between yourself and the person you are calling. On average, Skype uses between 3-16 kilobytes/sec depending on bandwidth available for other party, network conditions in between, callers CPU performance, etc.

And that's not bad either!

So the question led me to investigate and learn, and now you've learned something new too.