Skype Me! NYTimes & the New Phone Net

Free phone service over the Net is not new, but the improvements in quality are apparently not only making it more popular, but more intimate as well.

In a piece in tomorrow’s New York Times, Internet free speech evangelist and Grateful Dead lyricist, John Perry Barlow is quoted as saying about the free Skype Internet phone service, “The combination of anonymity and intimacy creates a special kind of environment.”

I was even more amazed to learn that “Skype says that it has over 2.8 million users in the United States and 30.6 million worldwide and that it is adding users at a rate of 155,000 a day. Skype’s biggest competitor, Vonage, a paid VoIP service, has about 550,000 customers.”

Am I delusional or is the Internet hotter than ever? Oh yea, here’s the link to the NY Times article.