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Skype, the popular peer-to-peer VoIP service owned by eBay, was unavailable yesterday. Long-standing errors in Skype’s client software shut down the company’s supernodes, which took down the entire service. See this New York Times article for more background.

Convenience is all about timing

eWeek reported today that Skype is slowly coming back up, but millions of users are still unable to access the service.

Skype is releasing situation reports on its blog – here is the most recent post.

eBay had moved its North American office telephones from landlines to Skype, which didn’t help matters much yesterday. I discussed some of the business reasons behind this decision on December 13.

For eBay and many small companies that had based their telecommunications strategy in Skype, yesterday was a bitter lesson about redundant systems and failover. As two analysts noted in the eWeek article, Skype is not a landline replacement. The Financial Times pointed out today that disappointed Skype users may go back to less convenient, more reliable options.

Reliability is valuable

Systems will fail. Skype had four years to fix the problem that emerged yesterday. At Los Angeles International Airport last weekend, 20,000 passengers were stranded when a single network interface card (NIC) on a workstation caused a major LAX network to crash within 70 minutes. See SlashGear, CrunchGear and Consumerist for more details.

Bloggers including Mark Evans and Allen Stern discussed one interesting reswult of the outage – it really does appear that Skype matters.

Say what you want about Microsoft Paint… it’s free.

Set the sarcasometer to snark, Mr. Jobs!

Yesterday’s Honolulu Advertiser ran a story about the possible local effects of the subprime mortgage crisis.

The article ran above the top fold of the front-page, which was a surprise. For the last 5 years, almost every housing market headline I’ve seen in the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin has been relentlessly upbeat and positive. Local residents and mainland investors have been snapping up old and new properties at a furious pace across all the major islands. International investors are also a big part of the local market, as Hawaii is still an attractive place to own a second home.

Of course, both papers have reported about our traffic woes. West Oahu is choked in gridlock, as local governments struggle to widen roads and add essential services, even as new housing developments continue.

I’ve been reading Ben Jones’ Housing Bubble Blog for the last 6 months. He posts quotes and discussion from mainland newspapers, and the bad news has been coming for a while. It’s well-written, and I highly recommend it.

The Advertiser’s article focused on subprime mortgages, but the implications are clear. This morning’s New York Times included a story about the tightening market for jumbo mortgages – home loans that are above FreddieMac and FannieMae limit of US$417,000. One New York buyer was quoted an 8% rate on a million dollar loan a few days ago. When he decided to accept the offer three days later, the rate had risen to 13%. This quote comes from the Times, and also appeared in the Housing Bubble Blog:

“In California, it has shut down the purchase market,” said Jeff Jaye, a mortgage broker in the Bay area. “It has shut down the refi market.”

If rich people are having trouble getting loans for mainland properties, the Hawaii market will certainly be affected. The Federal limit for conventional mortgages is 50% higher than mainland limits, so a jumbo mortgage in Hawaii for a single-family home starts at US$625,500. According to Bankrate.com, today’s quote for a Hawaii jumbo mortgage is 7.09%, slightly higher than the mainland rate of 6.97%.

A quick calculation reveals that the monthly payment for a minimal Hawaii jumbo 30-year mortgage would be US$4199.34.

The housing market has been a key factor in Hawaii’s economic growth during the Bush administration. However, during the last month I’ve seen more and more cars and trucks with temporary magnetic signs advertising home buying services. That’s a sign that refinancing is becoming difficult to find in Hawaii.

I’ve also seen balcony banners on at least 3 downtown Honolulu high-rises advertising units available for sale. It’s startling to see these sales pitches as I drive down the freeway, and it’s anecdotal evidence that Hawaii’s housing market is changing.

I’ve been testing a new Mac application called Mailplane this week. I first read about this app on Silver Mac.

I have several Gmail accounts, including some from my Google Apps domains . Checking each account requires repeated cycles of signing in because Gmail can only display a single account in a browser at any one time.

I used to keep Safari and Firefox open so I could see my two main Gmail accounts.

But I really don’t like Safari much.

Mailplane is only in beta, but it really works well. Even if you only have a single Gmail account, Mailplane is worthwhile. It’s a customized web browser that handles your Gmail. Using Mailplane is better than checking Gmail with Outlook or another POP mail reader, as Mailplane is accessing Gmail as a web service.

I’ve got five invitations to try Mailplane. The first five people who post a comment and request an invite, and who link back to this blog, will get the invites.

I do use reCAPTCHA to help keep the spammers away from the comments. Sometimes the images are a bit fuzzy. Just click the arrow icon in the reCAPTCHA box to get a different set of images.

Remember, it’s a Mac app, so Windows users will get no love from Mailplane.

In a Business Week article earlier this week, Aaron Ricadela examined Facebook’s growing popularity with adults.

Social networking is a business tool

Facebook was started at Harvard, and remains popular with university students. I’ve had a Facebook account for almost 2 years, and I’ve recently seen more of my colleagues join that site.

As I’ve pointed out here on June 30 and on my old blog on September 11, some employers have used Facebook, MySpace and other social networking services to investigate applicants. MySpace is an annoying clutter of images, spam and media files, and I rarely check my MySpace account these days. Facebook is quieter, and it seems safer, although that site has become a popular target for malware distribution, according to yesterday’s brief article in Campus Technology.

Entrepreneurs and executives have found that Facebook is a great way to do their own social networking. I think that Facebook is more fun to use than LinkedIn, a popular social networking site that is geared towards working professionals. My colleagues seem to prefer LinkedIn to Facebook.

LinkedIn is hanging on to its audience – for now. Facebook’s mobile site is much easier to use than LinkedIn’s current offering, and that may be one reason that Facebook is gaining older users. My July 2nd article discussed how executives are being targeted through search engines and social networking sites such as LinkedIn.