I’m a big fan of Skype. It works well, does just what it says it should, is dead easy, and means you can talk to your friends for free. But… hmmmm.

I got quite excited when it let you register real phone numbers so that people could call you from regular landlines, and quickly snapped up a London number to supplement my non-London home number (and my non-London VoIP number). I see tonight, though, that there’s less than a week left to run on that number, which means three months must have gone by since I acquired it.

In that time, though, I’ve become a bit disillusioned with the service. As a phone replacement, it simply doesn’t cut it, and so I think I’m going to let the number lapse. I’ve had much less use from it than I thought, and really only use the PC-to-PC features with any kind of regularity.

I’ll hang on to my regular Skype account (username nikplus), so add that to your list if you’re a Skype-reading regular reader. In the meantime, though, in the last couple of days that the real-world Skype number has to run, how about an experiment.

The number is 020 8816 8861. It has voicemail. In the unlikely event you feel like calling it, I’ll download whatever you want to say and post the results on here.

So, call it.

Go on… call it.

Unless you’re too chicken…

(Download Skype here)

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